A hospital is no place for a sick person. My dad told me that. Someone probably told it to him or he heard it somewhere on TV. A hospital is maze of hallways, vending machines and people wearing paper booties over their shoes rushing around from corridor to corridor pounding buttons on the wall with their fist to make doors open automatically.
The people who work in hospitals probably really do care about the patients they look after, but you might never know it unless you look real hard for signs. Signs that they don’t care are easier to spot. I would imagine hospital workers, given less to do, might show more outward, genuine compassion instead of that outward, rehearsed, canned and packaged and about-to-expire compassion.
I once had occasion to spend a couple of days in a hospital and have to agree wholeheartedly that yes, a hospital is no place for a sick person.
Confined for very long to a small, private room with baby blue walls, a bed so uncomfortable your dog would not lay on it, a bathroom the size of a linen closet and a window that looks out onto a rock-covered rooftop, I imagine one could go quite mad.
Add to that hospital staff’s refusal to feed you solid food and insistence you sleep with a needle in your arm hooked up to a bag of sodium chloride, it’s any wonder anyone ever goes to a hospital. How do these things make money? Wouldn’t most people rather just die?
Returning from a coffee run, I was told the party I was there to see was taken for a procedure and I could wait in the waiting room downstairs. The nurse said she would tell someone I was there and to let me know the results of the procedure, a relatively minor endoscopic search of the stomach.
I hunkered down. I checked my e-mail on the computers in the waiting room and skimmed the Web sites of the New Yorker and The New York Times – despite signs on the computer stations explaining the machines were for those looking for jobs within the organization that ran the hospital. I didn’t care. No else did either. The twelve o’clock news came on. I got a cup of coffee. The second half hour of the news began. I got another coffee – this time with Sweet ‘n Low and non-dairy creamer. The news went off. “All My Children” came on.
A young and very attractive brunette actress was professing her undying love to another young and very attractive brunette actress. After the first brunette told the second brunette why she couldn’t tell her parents about their wholesome, pure and epic love, the girls held each other in a tender and emotional embrace. About that time a nurse shouted “
I pulled my feet out of the chair across the aisle from my chair and stood up to see who had called out. When I walked over to address the scrub-wearing nurse, she told me that the procedure had been long finished, another had been completed, and the party I was there to see was back upstairs in his room resting comfortably. “We didn’t know you were down here,” she told me. “Dr. Arupeni asked where you were but no one told us you were down here waiting.”
“I’ve been here at least an hour and a half,” I told her. “The nurse said she was going to tell somebody to let me know how he was doing.”
“She must’ve forgot,” the waiting room nurse told me.
“Must have,” I said, trying to let my indignation show a little.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “No one told us.”
No one apparently tells anyone anything in a hospital. For being so concerned about medical records and histories and drug interactions and medications people are taking, people who work in hospitals don’t seem to read up on the stuff. Huge files of information sit in cabinets outside patient room doors just waiting to tell nurses, doctors, technicians -- and new things I discovered called “hospitalists” -- everything they want to know about the person on the other side of the door. But either they aren’t read, or they’re not trusted.
At any given moment, a smock-wearing, pocket-protected wing-tipped med school resident can walk in and ask a series of questions remarkably similar to the questions asked by a different smock-wearing, pocket-protected and wing-tipped med school resident two hours earlier.
“And when did the problem start? Uh, huh. And how long have you been taking Lipitor? Right. So you’re taking aspirin too? Was the stool black? How many times? Are you diabetic. Are you allergic to any medications? Penicillin? Yes. And how long has hair been growing out of it? And if you move it up and down rapidly, does it hurt?”
It’s a wonder anyone remembers their name after a few Q and As like that. I bet cops are less aggressive interrogating a suspect who just killed his boss and buried him in the back yard. I can understand why the cops may send around a few different detectives to ask the same questions. If they get different answers, they know the bastard’s lying. What do doctors want? To catch you in a lie about the last time you gave yourself an enema?
Hospital workers also get a perverse pleasure out of depriving their inmates, patients rather, of sleep. Don’t ever let them put a needle in your arm and attach a tube from a bag on a pole. It’s trouble with a capital T. Once they start that drip, it’s every hour, checking the blood pressure, checking the temperature, checking the pulse. The night nurse must think if they’ve got to stay up till the next shift comes in at
God forbid you have to take a leak in the middle of the night. And trust me, as soon as they hook that saline up to your veins, you are flush with fluids and piss like a fire hydrant. Let them hook blood up to your IV? Forget it. On top of being cold as a witch’s tit because the stuff is kept in a 10-degree Whirlpool, the nurses are on you every half hour to make sure you don’t have a reaction to the donor blood. What that reaction may be is not something they tell you. Only that it’s possible.
But one of the oddest things I saw on my recent visit was the dispensation of two Tylenol caplets to a patient who claimed to be in no pain whatsoever. Perhaps it was about to expire and rather than throw it out, they figured they could bill somebody for it at five bucks a pill. Thank you Uncle Sam.
Hospital people also seem to have something against people who eat their meals at odd times. The cafeteria is open for breakfast from
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