• The dog waiting for its owner in the driver’s seat of a car in the hospital parking lot.
  • Kid Rock’s surprising insightfulness about concert ticketing economics in a Planet Money interview from 2013.
  • How even just a few days of my grandpa’s being in the hospital has brought other families’ experiences into sharper focus for me. My family has so much privilege—access to a good hospital, to which we were only able to take him because we didn’t have to rely on (or pay for) an ambulance; relatives whose jobs allow them to come and advocate for him. If it’s been this tough for us over the past few days, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like for others without those advantages. And then there’s the scale of it: that something like what we’re going through (and often much worse) is replicated thousands of times every day.
  • How even at a well-run hospital, my grandpa’s care depends on his kids’ and grandkids’ being there to listen to doctors, make decisions, and follow up on things that might otherwise slip through the cracks (nurses have to be reminded that he’s blind, for example). I know that some hospitals have “sitters” that will stay in-room with a patient when they don’t have the constant supervision of an ICU room. But even with that program (which is opt-in), it seems like a wonder to me that anyone gets adequate care without relatives or friends who can treat it like a (hopefully temporary) full-time job.