palestrino
Day 1 rant!
Mar 05, 2009
Rather than a true blog, which is written to please a certain audience, this is more of a journal really. Something for me to look back some time down the road and remember these difficult days. On the other hand, perhaps some people could benefit from it, so I'll keep it public for the moment. Let's get writing then.
Day 1 was the day when I woke up with a lot of pain, and as far as I can remember, a little delirious. It was also the day where my stretcher was parked next to a few patients who were also waiting to be transfered to their rooms, one of which was crying like crazy and talking about suing... I couldn't quite understand what was her problem, but it seemed she was in a lot of pain. So was I for Christ's sake! To be honest, she was making such a scandal that I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for her. Don't get me wrong, I did experience a lot of pain in the last days, which made me more aware of the hardship of others, but there ways and ways of complaining and she was really having a complete lack of regard to others.
The first time I got annoyed, after the exagerated shouting from the lady mentioned above, was when it took ages for the hospital to transfer me to the room. A room had been assigned to me, and one of the hospital's employees had been assigned the job of taking me to the room. For whatever reason the guy dragged his feet for ages which got me really pissed off. My wife, who had been next to me, giving me a lot of support had been told that I would be transferred up in a minute and had gone to the 10th floor... and there I was, having to tolerate the noise and the chatter of so many of the people around me for god knows how long. A hospital is not really a peaceful place, as in the movies. It's quite the opposite really (at least from what I could gather from my experience). The problem is that I'm one of those people who only wants peace and silence while recovering from a major surgery, and my hope was that I could find that in the room.
So to the room I went eventually. I don't remember much about the first day but I do remember that the first night was really miserable.
The things that made my night miserable:
- My room was a sauna. I politely asked the nurse to sort this out, but she said she couldn't do anything about it so she offered me a wet towel. Not nice, I was sweating like crazy.
- The other patient in the room had not paid for his TV. This meant that he had access to only a handful of free channels, one of which was actually a talk radio, I think. The point is that while I was looking for peace and quiet, I think he had the max volume on his TV on this very annoying radio station. And I was silly enough not to complain and wound up putting up with it.
- As it turns out, nurses (at least most of the nurses who worked on my floor while I was there) don't respond particularly quickly to events around then. Just to give you an example, the IV machines start beeping when the IV liquid has run out. The beeps are extremely loud and annoying. One can hear someone's IV machine beeping 4 or 5 rooms away. I suspect that running out of IV liquid is not a high importance event in their to do lists, so they would let people's machines beeping for almost an hour at times. There is no good way to represent how annoying this can be, particularly when it's happening during the whole night when all you want is peace and quiet. By the way, I later learned that even if they didn't have an IV bottle at hand, they could press a button and silence the machine in the mean time. They just didn't care to make the floor quiet...
- The doctor came by and told me that I had to do an upper GI x-ray exam the morning after. Later, I asked another doctor who came by about why I was the only one who needed this exam (which I didn't really know, but I thought this was a good way to press for the truth) and he seemed confused, and said that some people have surgeries more complex than others, bla, bla, bla. That, added to the fact that my procedure took almost 3 hours while I had been told it would take one hour and a half, made me freak out a little bit. And then I remembered that one of the things that delayed my transfer to the room was that the catheter had collected too little urine (more about the catheter later). At that time, I was convinced that something had gone terribly wrong, perhaps a kidney failure or a damaged kidney during the procedure. I saw myself joining the queue for a kidney transplant...
- My pain medicine ran out. I called the nurse using the red button and to make a long story short, I wound up having to wait for an hour and a half because... they were changing shifts and apparently this is a good enough reason to delay everything that needs to be done for the patients. Oh, I forgot to mention that when the nurse came to see if the pain medication had really ran out, she was convinced that it hadn't even though she could see that the little envelope was empty. A typical example of "the computer says no" type of clerk. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up "Carol Beer" at youtube.
- Nothing like a little more shouting to make a night at the hospital perfect. I'm not sure what pissed me off more - that someone would shout continuosly, cursing in Spanish for hours, or that the nurses would not go there and either help the person or silence her if there was no reason for the shouting.
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Day 1 was the day when I woke up with a lot of pain, and as far as I can remember, a little delirious. It was also the day where my stretcher was parked next to a few patients who were also waiting to be transfered to their rooms, one of which was crying like crazy and talking about suing... I couldn't quite understand what was her problem, but it seemed she was in a lot of pain. So was I for Christ's sake! To be honest, she was making such a scandal that I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for her. Don't get me wrong, I did experience a lot of pain in the last days, which made me more aware of the hardship of others, but there ways and ways of complaining and she was really having a complete lack of regard to others.
The first time I got annoyed, after the exagerated shouting from the lady mentioned above, was when it took ages for the hospital to transfer me to the room. A room had been assigned to me, and one of the hospital's employees had been assigned the job of taking me to the room. For whatever reason the guy dragged his feet for ages which got me really pissed off. My wife, who had been next to me, giving me a lot of support had been told that I would be transferred up in a minute and had gone to the 10th floor... and there I was, having to tolerate the noise and the chatter of so many of the people around me for god knows how long. A hospital is not really a peaceful place, as in the movies. It's quite the opposite really (at least from what I could gather from my experience). The problem is that I'm one of those people who only wants peace and silence while recovering from a major surgery, and my hope was that I could find that in the room.
So to the room I went eventually. I don't remember much about the first day but I do remember that the first night was really miserable.
The things that made my night miserable:
- My room was a sauna. I politely asked the nurse to sort this out, but she said she couldn't do anything about it so she offered me a wet towel. Not nice, I was sweating like crazy.
- The other patient in the room had not paid for his TV. This meant that he had access to only a handful of free channels, one of which was actually a talk radio, I think. The point is that while I was looking for peace and quiet, I think he had the max volume on his TV on this very annoying radio station. And I was silly enough not to complain and wound up putting up with it.
- As it turns out, nurses (at least most of the nurses who worked on my floor while I was there) don't respond particularly quickly to events around then. Just to give you an example, the IV machines start beeping when the IV liquid has run out. The beeps are extremely loud and annoying. One can hear someone's IV machine beeping 4 or 5 rooms away. I suspect that running out of IV liquid is not a high importance event in their to do lists, so they would let people's machines beeping for almost an hour at times. There is no good way to represent how annoying this can be, particularly when it's happening during the whole night when all you want is peace and quiet. By the way, I later learned that even if they didn't have an IV bottle at hand, they could press a button and silence the machine in the mean time. They just didn't care to make the floor quiet...
- The doctor came by and told me that I had to do an upper GI x-ray exam the morning after. Later, I asked another doctor who came by about why I was the only one who needed this exam (which I didn't really know, but I thought this was a good way to press for the truth) and he seemed confused, and said that some people have surgeries more complex than others, bla, bla, bla. That, added to the fact that my procedure took almost 3 hours while I had been told it would take one hour and a half, made me freak out a little bit. And then I remembered that one of the things that delayed my transfer to the room was that the catheter had collected too little urine (more about the catheter later). At that time, I was convinced that something had gone terribly wrong, perhaps a kidney failure or a damaged kidney during the procedure. I saw myself joining the queue for a kidney transplant...
- My pain medicine ran out. I called the nurse using the red button and to make a long story short, I wound up having to wait for an hour and a half because... they were changing shifts and apparently this is a good enough reason to delay everything that needs to be done for the patients. Oh, I forgot to mention that when the nurse came to see if the pain medication had really ran out, she was convinced that it hadn't even though she could see that the little envelope was empty. A typical example of "the computer says no" type of clerk. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up "Carol Beer" at youtube.
- Nothing like a little more shouting to make a night at the hospital perfect. I'm not sure what pissed me off more - that someone would shout continuosly, cursing in Spanish for hours, or that the nurses would not go there and either help the person or silence her if there was no reason for the shouting.