Invisible hugs, or handshakes, as appropriate, to all my invisible friends.
It's good to be home, but this time I'm tireder and shakier than ever before.
It will take a few days just to recover from the hospital stay, which, pardon
me, I will make the subject of this note and perhaps some others.
How can one not arrive home ready to do a Rip Van Winkle when one has been
unable to get more than a couple of hours of continuous sleep for five days?
When I think of my original five-week hospital stay, I wonder how I lived
through it. Yet the truth of the matter is that I felt better upon release
back then than I do now. But of course now I have a few months of chemo behind
me, and I guess it's all building up in the blood.
Even so, I think hospitals could do a lot to raise your sense of well being.
Like treating you like a human being, and not a thing, for one. It is, of
course, essential for administrators, doctors and nurses alike not to identify
with patients in general. That I understand. But doesn't it cross their minds
that a loudspeaker placed six inches away from a patient's head and all day
ringing with sudden loud announcements -- i.e. that Nurse Edith should give
her location or report to the desk for a phone call -- have nothing at all to
do with the patient who is trying to recover from a night of constant (and
unavoidable) interruptions of sleep? It reduces one to thinghood. Isn't that
just a bit on the basic side? Couldn't there at least be a volume control (the
sound level depends upon the announcer -- supermarket level in some cases) or
a switch so that staff members could switch on when they were in the room and
off when they left? That is too expensive a device for a hospital with a
basement full of equipment that could take you to Andromeda and back? These
hospitals are places that can run up a bill of $20,000 a week. (I speak from
experience. The insurance company still seems to be musing ... and that was
July/August.) At my hospital, the loudspeaker announcements began at 7 a.m.
and ended at 7 p.m., or so it seemed, and the frequency of announcements
depended on the nurse in control of the apparatus. I noticed that some nurses
made announcements much more frequently than others.
So there is bellyache No. 1 about heap big important New York hospitals. I
understand the situation is precisely the same at the heap big New York
hospital smack next door.
When I mentioned this to one of the doctors he told me I was right and should
write to the CEO of the hospital. I asked him if other patients complained
about the interruptions and he said not to his knowledge. Amazing. Have any of
my fellow travelers shared this experience of mine? I'd love to know, and what
you think about it.
Have a nice hushed evening.
Yours with heavy eyes
-- Ron
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is an automatically-generated notice. If you'd like to be removed
from the mailing list, please visit the Medicine-On-Line Discussion Forum
at <http://www.meds.com/con_faq.html>, or send an email message to:
majordomo@lists.meds.com
with the subject line blank and the body of the message containing the line:
unsubscribe mol-cancer your-email-address
where the phrase your-email-address is replaced with your actual email
address.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
