Port of Entry

Why does hospital art always look the same?

They took me to the third floor of the Idaho Falls Community Hospital. Nice place. New floors, soft lighting. Modern enough to make you forget why you’re there, until you remember.

The hallway was lined with art designed to be unnoticed. Generic, distant—tractors at sunset, mountains stripped of shadow, sunflowers that felt vaguely threatening in their optimism. This was the kind of art that lives in hospitals across the country. Cropped too tight. Saturation pulled low. Edited by someone’s uncle who learned Lightroom during a divorce.

You know the type—sunbursts behind tractors, wheat fields in soft focus, mountain vistas scrubbed clean of anything human. It’s like stock photography for the American subconscious. I’ve seen better composition in the accidental photos my thigh takes when my phone’s in my back pocket.

But there’s a reason for it, I think. It’s meant to be soothing, in that lobotomy kind of way. To say: Don’t feel. Don’t think. Don’t ask. It’s art that’s afraid of having an opinion. Afraid to offend. Afraid to remind you that behind every barn door and golden field, somebody probably died. That somebody might be you.

Hospitals are the one place where art goes to die. Every hallway the same: sunbursts at f/22, stoic barns backed by insultingly inoffensive skies. Who paid for all this neutrality? Why are we so committed to pretending that beauty means silence? That calm equals peace?

I’m not calm. I’m dying. And this art wants me to die quietly.

But I won’t. I’ll write about it instead. I’ll pick this scab until it bleeds metaphor. Because when the body becomes a battlefield, you start to look for meaning in absurd places. In the waiting room wallpaper. In a misplaced tractor. In The Karate Kid, rerunning on a hospital TV at 11:42 a.m.

Yes. The Karate Kid.

My room was suspiciously well-lit. Sterile in that way that suggests someone tried a little too hard. The bed faced the television, which was playing that one scene. Daniel was painting the fence. Up. Down. Side to side. He didn’t get it. Not yet. He thought Mr. Miyagi was wasting his time, stalling him with chores instead of teaching him how to fight.

But we know better.

Mr. Miyagi wasn’t teaching him to fight. He was teaching him how to endure. Every movement, wax on, wax off, was survival in disguise. It was about training the body to move even when the mind didn’t understand. It was about patience. About trusting what feels pointless. Ritual as instruction. Repetition as muscle memory. Pain as preparation.

And that hit me, maybe harder than the cancer diagnosis ever did.

Because I realized: I’m Daniel. The fence is my body. The procedure is my practice. The chemo port they’re threading into my chest? That’s my kata. I’m not being stalled. I’m being prepared.

Wax on. Wax off.

The language around cancer is all wrong. They tell you to “fight it.” That you’re a “warrior.” That you’re “beating cancer.” But those phrases turn your own body into an enemy. They make you a soldier when what you really are is a student. I don’t believe in fighting cancer. Not like that. Not with swords and flags and Instagram posts. I believe in learning from it. I believe in bowing to it without giving it the power to name me.

Cancer isn’t some invader. It’s me. My own cells, confused and multiplying. It’s my body, breaking its own rules. And what a cruel, sacred thing—to learn that the thing trying to kill you once existed to keep you alive.

So no. I won’t wage war on myself. I’ll wax. I’ll block. I’ll breathe. I’ll let the lesson move through me. Because cancer isn’t a battle. It’s a lesson. And I’m being taught slowly. Patiently. Frame by frame. New appointment, by new appointment.

Wax on. Wax off.

And while we’re here—while I’m sitting in this stupid hospital bed trying to understand why the sunflower in the hallway looks like it’s judging me—let me admit something else: The worst part of all this isn’t the port. It isn’t the scans. It isn’t even the dying. It’s the feeling that I’m falling behind. That while I’m here getting catheterized and told to rest, the world is carrying on without me. That my advertising agency—the business I built from scratch—is now frozen in time. That the clients have moved on. That deadlines are being met without me. That I’m becoming a ghost in a Google Drive.

But here’s what cancer keeps whispering back: You’re not falling behind.  You’re being rerouted. The hardest thing I’ve had to learn is that rest is not punishment. Stillness is not failure. That just because the world rewards speed doesn’t mean slowness isn’t sacred.

Daniel thought he was falling behind, too. Watching everyone else spar while he painted fences and waxed cars. But while they were learning tricks, he was building muscle memory. Survival. Discipline. A way of moving through pain.

That’s what I’m doing now.

Cancer is my Mr. Miyagi. It’s forcing me to unlearn urgency. To detach my worth from my productivity. To understand that my body, even in stillness, is building something. And when—if—I return to the work, I’ll return with more precision, more wisdom, and more fucking clarity than I ever had before.

Because I didn’t just hustle. I healed.

And then, right as that thought began to settle, they slid the needle in.

The procedure was fast. So fast I barely registered it. I was awake the whole time, but not awake-awake. I was somewhere between curiosity and dissociation. Lidocaine hummed through me like white noise with good intentions. My hands rested on my stomach like I was bracing for a secret.

On a flatscreen above me, I watched them thread the port in. Not metaphorically—literally. A real-time feed of my own chest, opened and explored like terrain. I saw my body lit from within, lit like something divine or mechanical. It felt like watching a movie I didn’t audition for but somehow starred in. Some other woman’s ribcage. Some other woman’s breath.

But it was mine.

My surgeon—the kind of man who probably microdoses before ski trips—started chatting casually with his assistant mid-procedure. Loud enough for me to hear. Loud enough to make it real.

“She was a cunt bitch,” he said, referring to a nurse named Linda.
Then, “But I felt bad for her” as if that cleaned the blood off the blade.

Linda. Wherever you are. I’m sorry. Your name is in my bloodstream now.

I lay there—tubed, numbed, open—and thought: this feels less like a hospital and more like a salon. Not a battlefield. A salon. I half-expected someone to ask if I wanted bangs.

The port’s in now. Just beneath the skin, tucked quietly into the soft curve of my collarbone. It clicks against my bra strap like it’s trying to say something. A small plastic mouth with no tongue, no teeth. Just a promise: this will keep you here. Maybe. For a while.

They said it would help. Help deliver the medicine. Help save what’s left. But no one talks about how it feels—how foreign it is to carry a thing meant to heal you that wasn’t born with you. How strange it is to be part flesh, part fixture. How survival sometimes arrives looking like an insertion.

They wheeled me out an hour later. Port in. Bandaged. A little bruised. A little more bionic than before. And everything looked exactly the same. The tractor art. The sunflower. That same dumb mountain range with all the shadows sucked out of it. Nothing had changed—except me.

And maybe that’s what makes it so disorienting. That you can undergo a procedure that feels like spiritual surgery, and still exit through the same hallway that pretends grief doesn’t exist.

I’m not sure what lesson I was supposed to learn today. Maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe the waxing, the waiting, the art, the port—maybe all of it just is. Even Linda.

Still, I keep thinking about that scene. Daniel, standing there, exhausted, confused, sick of it all. “I’ve been doing everything you’ve told me,” he says. “And it’s not getting me anywhere.”

And Mr. Miyagi says, “Not everything is as it seems.” Then he shows him what he’s learned. And suddenly—he knows how to block.

I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet. But I’m still here. Still blocking. Still watching. Still trying to find the edges of the lesson. All while an old red combine harvester print stares back at me from the hallway wall.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer