Breakfast is Served

The hospital breakfast tray looked inviting.

An oxymoron, but true.

My brother Martin had undergone back surgery. Since I wanted to speak with his surgeon, I got up the next morning at an obscenely early hour so that I would be at the hospital when the surgeon began his rounds.

About an hour after I arrived, Martin’s roommate Richard was whisked away on a gurney to undergo a procedure. Soon after, their breakfast trays arrived.

I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was starving. And I couldn’t go to the cafeteria because I might miss the surgeon’s visit. So I was pretty much chained to the hospital room, my hunger pains getting worse with each passing moment.

“Hey, Mart, whatcha got there?” I asked, watching as Martin lifted the dome plate cover to reveal what tantalizing food lie beneath it.

Runny scrambled eggs. Overdone hash browns. Dry toast. Congealed orange juice. Applesauce.

A virtual feast.

Martin, oblivious to the loud grumblings from my stomach, started chowing down.

“So, you gonna eat that toast?” I asked. It’s kind of burnt.”

“Yeah, I am,” mumbled Martin in between bites of egg.

“And the hash browns!” I exclaimed. “They’re so overdone! How do they expect people to eat that stuff?

I waited a beat.

“So, are you gonna eat that stuff?” I asked.

His mouth was stuffed with food. Clearly he was.

My eyes shifted to Richard’s food tray. A dribble of saliva formed at the corner of my mouth.

Suddenly, I sat up straighter as a thought occurred.

I can have Richard’s breakfast! He’s still in surgery!

To further bolster my internal rationalizations, I came up with ways that my not eating Richard’s breakfast would be detrimental to his health:

He’ll be in a weakened state right after surgery. Surely it can’t be good for him to eat ice cold food, right? I’ll be doing him a service by eating it!

I ate everything but the runny eggs.

About twenty minutes later, Richard still hadn’t returned but his wife walked in, followed by a nurse. The wife, seeing the crumbs, discarded food packaging, and used napkin on Richard’s breakfast tray, stopped dead in her tracks, looking at it in disbelief.

“Oh, I ate his breakfast,” I piped up to relieve her confusion. “Richard was taken down for some procedure.”

“Whaaatt??” said the wife, obviously upset, turning to look at me.

Oh, boy, I thought. The poor woman didn’t know that Richard was having a procedure.

“Yeah, they took him down for a biopsy or something. I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I said in a soothing voice.

“You ate my husband’s breakfast?” she said, aghast.

Oh. Well, when she said it that way, maybe eating it hadn’t been my best course of action.

“It was getting cold,” I said weakly, guilt starting to seep in. “I thought they’d give him a fresh plate.”

“We heat it up!” admonished the nurse. “We put it here so he’d have something to eat as soon as he returned from surgery!”

My profuse apology was met with glares and silence.

I still think his wife should’ve thanked me because, about three hours after Richard returned, he was brought a fresh, piping hot breakfast tray.

And I didn’t even touch it.