If hospital stays can’t be avoided, and if you are the person visiting the patient, parking the car, walking over and getting directions to the room, it’s good to take in the view.

There’s the labyrinthine detours that construction can offer, in which unheard-of departments with stencilled windows might be found, and cavernous after-hour hallways too.

If you’re lucky, there is the leftover cotton-candy glow of a sunset just passed.

And maybe the walk between the car and the hospital offers a sentinel-like tree, whose sculptural effect can be admired in daylight and in twilight.

There are the rumpled sheets with stripes that can be caught too, in a picture of headphones taken for the right cord to be retrieved from home.

And sometimes, it’s the Sacred Heart that you might catch presiding a sunset before a crowd of marigolds, their yellow heads gazing upward.

And if your patient is on a higher floor, and you get the chance, do take a moment to catch the view. It can feel, for a second or two, that you’re gazing at unexpected art in a museum of suffering.