As humans, what is our ultimate need and desire?
I’ve determined it isn’t happiness, independence, love or the right to die unvaccinated. It’s to have your own room. So when I read that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services hopes to phase out multi-occupancy rooms and promote single-occupancy in long-term care, I felt a twinge of agreement — along with recognition and empathy for how difficult that could be for providers.
We each make our first naked quest toward this all-consuming goal at birth. We’ve been cramped interminably in the womb, with no temperature control, cable channels or menu options. It’s no wonder we emerge screaming.
Sadly, that initial glorious moment of infant self-determination is immediately dashed when many of us are forced to cohabitate with siblings for the early years of existence.
When we’re finally awarded our own room, it’s often too little too late, because we’re soon off to college dorms and roommates and all sorts of shared unpleasantness.
Maybe we occupy an apartment and get a bed alone for a short while after graduation, but marriage soon ruins all that, with divorce or witness protection offering the only viable respite. It’s sad that the idyllic world of 50s-era TV couples with their separate twin beds turned out to be such an unachievable utopia.
For me at least, the pursuit of spatial autonomy has never ended.
Right now, I’m in Canada helping my parents with the difficult move to their next chapter. I was given the opportunity to sleep on an air mattress in their living room.
But I made the unpopular choice to head to a hotel solely to have my own room, and maybe more important, my own bathroom — which I believe is another coequal human requirement for fully actualized living.
Although a shift entirely to private rooms might never be feasible in long-term care, striving for lower patient density seems like a worthy goal. The human desire for privacy is deeply ingrained, and when our residents must coexist in close quarters at the most vulnerable time of their entire lives, it can be a challenging shock to the system.
Thankfully, I don’t expect I’ll ever have to deal with that because I play the accordion, which is always a guarantee of absolute privacy.
