I’m not sure I’ve ever timed an editorial calendar better. This month’s issue focuses on “Light and Wellness,” and here I am, writing this column while flat on my back, five days post-surgery. If hospitals had loyalty programs like Chick-fil-A, I’d have enough points for a lifetime supply of post-surgical spicy chicken sammies (and preferably not the hospital variety).
Hospitals are homes of uncertainty. When I checked in, I didn’t exactly audit Monmouth Medical Center’s lighting technology. (It turns out they’ve made some upgrades: a radiology suite renovation featuring a SOMATOM Pro.Pulse CT scanner with mood lighting and visual instructions to calm patients, plus a lobby makeover with brighter, more welcoming ambient lighting. Circadian lighting? Not quite yet.) Basically, I arrived, they knocked out my lights, and I woke up in recovery. Easy peasy, anesthetically pleasing.
Over the next 24 hours, darkness was my default—heavily medicated and drifting somewhere in a neighborhood on Queer Street—with only one non-pharmaceutical comfort: a rainy, gray view of the Atlantic Ocean. Honestly, the ocean is more therapeutic than any healthcare environment I’ve ever encountered, but there are certainly less expensive, and more serene, ways to enjoy it.
After returning to work, the experience got me thinking: if light is so closely tied to wellness, why do we so often recover in the dark? Are those of us who treat pain like an old friend and would rather keep meds locked away than coursing through IVs just retreating to our past recovery experiences? Can chronologically gifted generations visualize rooms with gentle, tunable light that mimics sunrise and sunset, easing us back into balance? In a world where we’re urged to “follow the light,” why does recovery so often feel like a shadow realm?
The next frontier in patient care likely isn’t just better drugs or faster, more-intelligent scans—it’s creating environments that heal holistically. Light isn’t a luxury; it’s part of a lifeline. And if hospitals ever do roll out loyalty programs, I hope the reward is a room bathed in the kind of light that reminds us that we’re still very much alive and kicking (along with a few of those Chick-fil-A sandwiches).
Craig Causer
Editor-in-Chief
craig.causer@sagepub.com
THE MAGAZINE OF THE ILLUMINATING ENGINEERING SOCIETY
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