Laughter is the best medicine

Last night my sister and I were by my dad's emergency room bed waiting for his room assignment, and I looked up and told her "this looks new" pointing up to the pneumatic tube snaking around the ceiling. Even with our cumulative exhaustion, we couldn't help but giggle. We've been at the hospital's ER three times in the last 6 months, twice for my dad, and once for my mother. The waits can be rather lengthy, so you tend to notice when they've added new stuff. And the pneumatic tube is not subtle. I think it's a rather nice innovation for a hospital that needed a way to get information up to the rooms or the billing center a lot faster. We've had to wait over an hour in the past for a simple bill, because the elevators were taking too long, or because they had to wait for one piece of paper from one office to get to another.

We continued to chuckle as we came up with the idea that the hospital should give families that end up using the facilities a lot some kind of "mileage points", each confinement or visit earns certain points and you can use it for discounts at the restaurant, or maybe to offset the cost of less serious medical services. Let's say, 1000 points for a confinement, and after 10,000 points, you can get one free diamond peel at the dermatologist. We calculated that in the last six months, we've spent enough to pay for our entire family to travel to the US and Europe. Sayang ang miles!