Now this is my idea of a hospital room!
In fact, probably the only good thing that the private hospital had going for it was that all the rooms there are private, painted a pretty yellow and have an extra bed in case a friend or relative wants to stay with you.
At the general hospital where I ended up there are two patients to a room. My room was pretty basic, but there was a balcony with a nice view and it would have been quite tolerable if my roommates had had better manners. . .
I had four different roommates during my week-long stay. The first one was discharged the day after I arrived, which was good because she had been there for two months and her husband also slept there every night in a reclining chair. I thought that might have got a bit too cosy after awhile, especially as both of them talked non-stop (though seemingly not to each other) and they also had the tv on every waking moment.
My next roommate was a 59-year-old woman who (quite scarily for me) had been readmitted several times due to complications after having had the same operation as me a few years ago. She eventually had to have a colostomy bag ‘installed’ (what’s the right word for that?) and was now a total invalid at home. This latest crisis was apparently one of many she’s had over the years and she ended up staying from Tuesday to Friday. I got on quite well with her and her husband, and could even put up with her eight grown children constantly visiting, but the South American soap operas turned on full blast nearly drove me out of my mind.
On Friday evening a young woman (mid-twenties?) was brought in after having had an emergency appendectomy. Keyhole surgery. Her husband was with her and they were very polite about the tv. She was discharged the next morning.
So from Saturday morning until Sunday evening I had the room to myself and it was total bliss!
Then on Sunday evening an elderly woman was brought in for some sort of throat operation. She was half-deaf and liked to talk, and also liked listening to football on her portable radio FULL BLAST. Luckily I was leaving the next day, though I didn’t actually get discharged until around 3pm because it took awhile to get all the paperwork done.
But I ask you … what is it with people? I mean, isn’t it bad enough to be sharing a room with a total stranger while you are trying to get better without having to put up with their thoughtless behaviour? The thing about Spanish hospitals is that, while there are visiting hours for ‘the public’, family members can come and go any time of the day or night, and also stay the night. Which was why Nog was my husband and Pipocas my sister during my stay. They tended to stay the longest (an hour or so) and my other visitors would average about 15-20 minutes per visit, so I didn’t think that was too intrusive for others.
But sometimes – I kid you not – when I had someone visiting, instead of turning down the volume on the television they would turn the damn thing up because I guess two people talking in a normal speaking voice was somehow drowning out their stupid programme. They would even leave the damn thing on when I was obviously trying to sleep. Amazing.
Me? When I wasn’t sleeping I mostly read, listened to my iPod or watched DVDs (using earphones) on the portable DVD player that Pipocas lent me. I’m telling ya, that little machine saved my sanity. It was great to be able to just veg out for a couple of hours and just block out everything else. Oh, and I also kept my mobile phone on ‘silent’ so as not to disturb anyone else when I got calls or messages.
I really could not believe how insensitive other people – especially other sick people – could be.
Anyhow, here are a couple photos of my room and one of me eating my first solid food in ten days (and yes, the food was totally disgusting).
What are hospitals like where you are?
casa azahar 
Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours!
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our public hospitals sound much the same as yours – two to a room, but with a fair space between them and curtains you can keep pulled. when stephen was in hospital the other patients were pretty reserved and didn’t bother us too much.
the hospice though was like a 3 star hotel. if the circumstances hadn’t been so sad I’m sure I would have had a great time to write home about…..
and yes, you do look remarkably well in that photo I’m glad to say
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Well, I’d just been scrubbed down in the shower by a male nurse’s aid that morning – he even washed my hair for me. 🙂
Boy, I sure learned not to get embarrassed that week.
I really think that televisions shouldn’t be allowed in shared rooms unless they provide earphones in the headboards. Thinking back, the most annoying times were all about the selfish and thoughtless use of the television.
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I was on an open ward when I had my hysterectomy. roughly 20 people, of which is was in direct eye contact with about 10 of them. And boy, on an all female ward the amount of prying into each others business was phenomenal – I got informed what my husband was doing whilst waiting for me to wake up properly from my anaesthetic! No privacy – doctors had to break bad news to me and at least one other patient in full hearing of everybody.
Heck, the food was MINGING. How the hell do you make bread and butter pudding grey?! Lady in the next bed (who snored like nothing I’ve ever heard before or since – was kinda comforting though. Reminded me of home..lol) was fed entirely on care packages from her massive family.
Still, I did have the best surgeon in europe operate on me, so it was a small price to pay.
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I guess with 20 people they didn’t have any televisions.
The observation room at the private hospital had six beds in it and was quite bright and airy. At the GH there were 50 beds and it had a definite time-warp feeling to it. Pretty depressing. But I was just there overnight.
I reckon they use a flavour extractor. Almost all the food they served me actually looked quite nice but then had absolutely no flavour. I mean, how do you make baby potatoes (see photo above) taste like nothing?
I’m on a completely unrestricted diet at home now, but it took awhile before I actually started feeling hungry again.
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Are these flavour extractors anything to do with the e-numbers you find on containers of tasteless prepared food?
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Hospitals!
Of course, public hospitals is what we in Canada have unless you are having plastic surgery, I suppose… No “private” medicine, though you can have private insurance as an add-on to your provincial insurance.
I have, in my many, many…. many, etc., ad nauseum… hospital stays and have had “ward” (3-6 person to a room — it is large) rooms, semi-private (2 to a room) and even the odd private room. I have private insurance through my company and my father always had private insurance through either the company he was partner in or through the Government Insurance plan through his government employment. With that is semi-private but if there isn’t a semi-private room, you bet bumped to private.
In fact, I have generally not been displeased with the etiquette displayed by my co-patients.
My complaints have usually been around the food which has usually been horrifyingly bad, or on rare occasions the treatment of given by a nurse.
I am a “good patient”. I say please and thank you, I don’t ring the bell for no reason and I try to do whatever I need to do on my own. However, I have had the odd nurse who treats being summoned by a patient who has pain as some though she was being summoned to the top of Mount Everest in order to fluff a pillow.
I had one at the Almonte Hospital when I had my wisdom teeth out as a Day patient who insisted that I immediately call my father to come and pick me up, even though I wasn’t yet out of the anesthetic and couldn’t move my hands, yet. When I flopped about trying to dial, and finally slurred “Gannn u ialll na thonnn or mmmme” (the effects of both anesthetic and the fact that my face was swelled to twice its normal size) she grabbed the phone from me and yelled at me “What’s the number?” and as soon as she dialed slapped the receiver somewhere near my ear, whacking my face with it.
Once it was determined that my father, who had been originally told I would be ready to leave at noon would, 2 hours early, have to rush “immediately” to Almonte from Ottawa to get me, she huffed about having to hang up the phone and ordered me out of bed so she could ready the room for the next victim… errr… patient.
Since my legs were about as usable as my hands, she angrily “helped” me out of bed and thrust my clothes at me to dress as best I could with flippers for hands and legs I couldn’t feel.
I should have complained but didn’t.
I spent a week in a ward room at Toronto General while the doctors tried to determine the cause of abdominal pain. As I was feeling relatively okay between bouts of pain, I was able to socialize. However, there was a girl there, aged 15, who was in to have an abortion (for some resaon being done in the hospital not in a clinic) who the nurses treated so horribly and who was left alone during the whole ordeal “You think the pain is bad now? Just wait!” with the curtains pulled round her bed.
All of us in turn got up to comfort her through the long night, nurses coming in periodically to order up back to be. Poor kid was lonely and frightened and the nurses treated her like dirt.
Occasionally, I have experienced room-mates who turned the tv or radio up loud but since most hospital tvs have no speakers but you are provided with earphones, this isn’t a problem. On occasion you have huge families appear at the bedside of a neighbour and carry on like it was a house-party, even banging up against your bed.
When I spent a week in Albert Einstein Hospital in The Bronx, after having my gall bladder out, there was a woman somewhere across the hall who alternately played the TV at high volume until I asked a nurse to ask her to turn it down (I was still hovering in and out of anesthetic and morphine at this point, and thought the woman was in the same room. I was also violently ill, as I invariably am when coming out of anesthetic) and calling loudly over and over and over and over “I WANT AN ENEMA! WHY WON’T THE DOCTOR GIVE ME AN ENEMA!”. She was, apparently, as many seniors are (!!??) addicted to enemas and all day long –ALL DAY!– called out for enemas…. when she wasn’t playing her TV very loudly… sometimes both.
The first room-mate, prior to surgery, was a very nice little black woman who had worked in a hotel in South Carolina for most of her adult life. She had a lovely drawl and talked about the food she had cooked. Unfortunately, I was starving and wasn’t allowed to eat until my surgery…. I thought we would be room-mates when I came back from surgery but she was moved elsewhere and so was I.
For the first while after surgery, I was alone in the room and the bed was folded up. I thought, in my morphine-induced haze, that they had me stuck in a storage closet…
The next lady was a quiet woman who I never spoke to as she was there for a day before being moved on.
The next one was a 60-ish Jewish lady who appeared to have dementia, bad hearing, and didn’t understand English. She played her TV very loudly and when I asked her to turn it down, looked blankly at me. I had to wait until her husband came in and asked him to turn it down. As soon as he left, up it went, again.
She was also incontinent and, while she would go into the bathroom every 15 minutes, very little of what she did went into the appropriate receptacle. How she managed to pee all over the floor, wall, and door EVERY time, I don’t know but as I was having to rush to the loo as a result of all the antibiotics, I either had to call a nurse to clean it up or do it myself. The nurses, for the most part, balked at either cleaning it or calling a cleaner in.
I finally, once I was able to get around, went down the hall to the public washroom. I was SO glad when they finally moved her a day or so later and I had my room to myself for the remainder of my stay.
That hospital also failed to change my meal order from “liquid” to “solid” after 3 days and despite being told repeatedly but the doctor and staff, and my placing n order for a solid meal, sent up the liquid diet. Since it was a Jewish hospital, as well as my stay being over Passover, the menu was Kosher so the “Jello” was this horrible fake gelatin with Aspartame instead of sugar. I got black coffee, despite ordering tea, and they only send apple juice and 7-Up to drink.
The final morning of my stay, they finally sent my “solid” meal which was, bar none, the worst meal I have ever eaten in or out of hospital… I ordered poached egg and tea . They sent up a greasy, salty, orangey-coloured scrambled egg concoction which had broken-up Matzo crackers mixed into it and coffee….. no milk and no sugar.
Of course, that was also the day that the officiously rude “nutritionist” came up again to see me. She took one look at the meal and lit into me about my diet. Despite my protesting that 1) This was the first solid meal I had eaten in over 10 days 2) I hadn’t ordered this meal and had ordered my usual breakfast of poached eggs and 3) it was so horrible I hadn’t eaten it this bitch ranted on for 15 or 20 minutes about how I was ‘so fat because of the food I chose —CHOSE!– to eat”…
Of course, she was a twig….
I should have complained but didn’t.
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Addicted to enemas?! I had ONE once. NEVER again. Takes all sorts, I guess. What’s wrong with bran flakes?
We had one television in the day room. I stayed out of there as it was were the scary ladies hungout. Y’know – the ones who wanted your entire medical history – complete with a show and tell of scars – about ten seconds after you sit down. . Don’t believe ANYBODY about the great British reserve. Get a group of women together in hospital and there’s nothing they wont try and get out of you. Spanish inquisition in a former life.
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Happily I haven’t had as many hospital experiences as you, Anneke – either good or bad. Just the hysterectomy (a five-day stay) and this one. And fingers crossed that I won’t have any more – well, at least not for a very long time.
Bad behaviour on the part of hospital staff is a topic I’ll deal with on another post. And yes, you really should have complained.
With you on the enemas, Sara. I had so many that week I was being misdiagnosed until they – duh – figured out that the reason they weren’t working was because there was actually nothing down there since the colon was being blocked further up. Idiots.
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Did you say anything to the other patients who had the TVs blaring while you had visitors or were trying to sleep? Its so difficult to confront people when you’re feeling sick and low, so I guess maybe not. That’s when you need annoying English people…
I would have marched in, indignantly gone all ‘English Schoolmistress’ on them and loudly and imperiously demanded that they mind their manners on your behalf 🙂
probably wouldn’t have helped, but it might have been fun!!!
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Oh, az, how nasty for you!
I was in the hospital for almost a month — April 6 to May 1 — the first five I was in ICU with no tv. Didn’t bother me; my area was separated from the other beds in there by only long curtains, so it was A-Ok with me.
In the ward at the general hospital, I was in a room with 8 beds (briefly nine, when they wheeled a gurney-like bed across the windows!). Yo hablo muy poqueto (?) Espanol, az! Try 3 weeks of Mexican TV, talk-shows, novellas and all, for fun. Loud knock-down drag out family dramas, and that was the talk shows! LOL
The food — as yes, thought I’d forgotten all about that. No surprise I lost 22 pounds from start to discharge!
I got yelled at by the nutritionist, too — I’m diabetic and they INSISTED on giving me what appeared and tasted like old-fashioned TV dinners, with white bread and mashed potatoes and other simple starches — when, after seeing my trays come back with most of the “food” still on them for three weeks, shows up to defend the kitchen’s choices *on the day I was discharged*! It all came back, staring at the tray they’d give me, and trying to figure out what I could eat that wouldn’t skyrocket my blood sugar…
Glad you survived it, and you do look well in that picture, thank Ghod! 🙂
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“Try 3 weeks of Mexican TV, talk-shows, novellas and all, for fun.”
Gaaaaa! I don’t know how you survived that, SC. Though not understanding the awful dialogue probably helped.
I wonder why hospital food is so routinely bad.
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