Hospital Livin'

After spending two weeks in the same hospital, I have a few observations and thoughts.

Food
I worked in a nursing home for 4 years in the dietary department. The food wasn't bad. OK, some of it was bad. For the most part, though, it was decent and I would know, since I had at least one meal a day there when I was on shift.

Several years ago, a new hospital opened in the town we were living in. It was new and posh, as hospitals go. The cafeteria was set up like a restaurant and the food there was good, too.

I wrongly assumed that this hospital would have edible food. Wroooooooong. The nursing home and new hospital had led me to believe that the era of hospital food tasting like Purina Dog Chow was over, but the hospital my husband was in this time served as a reminder of why hospital food stereotypes exist in the first place.

I saw the cafeteria staff serve up things there that I wouldn't serve to a stray dog. Neon red tomato sauce. Stomach-churning pork and sauerkraut. Mashed potatoes the consistency of hardening cement. I risked salmonella poisoning by giving the salad bar a go, and it turned out to be a winner. That, and their bagels, which were delivered from a local bakery. I think I ate 37 bagels and the equivalent of six tubs of cream cheese while I was there.

It was a matter of survival.

Nurses
As a rule of thumb, you should always be polite to people who can stab/inject/poison you while you are hooked up to machines. It is similar to the rule that says you should always be polite to people who can contaminate your food with anything from dirt to bodily fluids. (Advice from a former waitress here.)

As it turns out, you can also get improved service from any nurse that you are able to befriend, and my husband and I managed to do just that. It wasn't really intentional. We just live by the aforementioned rules and try to be nice people.

Everyone thought my husband was very sweet (most people do), which worked to his advantage. We also shared a love of "Gene Simmons' Family Jewels" with many of the nurses, who actually crowded into my husband's room to watch the season finale with him when things were quiet.

Here's a tip: want your pain meds FAST? Talk reality TV with the nursing staff.

Doctors
Poor doctors. They can't catch a break.
If you have one that has the personality of a tree stump or is very blunt, he is accused of having a poor bedside manner. If you get one that is too jovial, he is accused of barely graduating from Acme School of Medical Stuff. If he doesn't offer enough information, he is accused of being a spineless weenie.

Unless, of course, you're like us. We like the super jovial ones. We'd appreciate a doctor who wears a Spiderman tie. We're weird like that.

The doctors we encountered ran the gamut. The surgeons were very quiet-but-friendly Christian men who would have looked appropriate in Amish attire. The main infection specialist we saw both looked and acted like Lily Tomlin, only slightly nerdier. The doctor who removed the fluid from my husband's abdomen was fatherly and even called me "dear" and "sweetheart", though I am still trying to figure out if that's a good thing or a bad thing. One gastroenterologist had us stumped - did he look more like Gilbert Gottfried or Joel Osteen? We couldn't make up our minds. But he was the guy who told me I'd know my husband was in dire straights if I "saw him hooked up to a ventilator." Somehow he managed to say it in a very flowery and sing-songy way that would have made you feel good about facing a firing squad.

All of my husband's doctors were excellent, but some we greeted like Kramer on "Seinfeld", whereas others we greeted like the Pope, depending on how serious they were.

Other Patients
Hospitals are never quiet enough to sleep in, which is why most patients come home feeling like they just got sent home from the Vietnam War. Throw in a semi-deaf Amish farmer, an arguing old couple, and a confused elderly man and it might as well be World War III.

My husband's first roommate was the semi-deaf Amish farmer. He yelled at the nurses occasionally but spent most of his time on the phone, yelling at whoever called, in Pennsylvania Dutch.  If you've never heard Pennsylvania Dutch spoken before, the best way to describe it is German gibberish with the occasional English word thrown in.

"Oof dah flergin HORSE!"

There was also a confused elderly man down the hall who screamed profanities at staff. He sat in the hallway in a wheelchair cussing people out from dawn till dusk.

And in my husband's last room, there was an old couple across the hall who yelled at each other all day. Usually they argued, sometimes they just couldn't hear each other. The volume on hospital TVs don't usually go very high, but this couple found a way to make it audible to the floors above and below them.

The beeping IV machines were a welcome respite from the screaming patients.

"The mulch! The mulch! The mulch is on FIRE!"
In order to prevent myself from developing my own blood clots, I got up about once an hour to walk around. Usually, the cafeteria was my destination, where I downed insane amounts of watery hospital coffee.

Because we were in the midst of a heat wave, and because we had not had rain since the Mormons crossed the plains in buggies, everything was very dry. (How dry was it??)

I walked out to the parking lot to make a phone call and headed for one of the gardens for some shade under a tree. I smelled something as I was walking... something like... a barbecue? Then, I saw smoke. As I approached, I realized the mulch was on fire. No smoldering cigarette butt... just flaming mulch.

This is where I become a hero.
I was in a skirt and flip-flops, but did that stop me from putting out the fire? NO! I jumped and stomped on that sucker until the flames were out and the smoldering had died down. My feet were covered in mulch and dirt, but I did my duty as an American.

I went back into the hospital and told the security guard that he might want to check on the garden at the end of the parking lot because I had put out a random fire with nothing between the flames and my flesh but a cheap, Wal-Mart brand piece of rubber. He looked over at the secretary at the ER desk, and they instantaneously broke out into song:

"The mulch! The mulch! The mulch is on FIRE!"

In closing...
The hospital was an ordeal. It is not the type of thing I want to do again anytime soon. Nice people, clean bathrooms, but not a good vacation spot.

And yet, as is the case with everything else in my life, the ordeal gave me some great stories and certainly plenty of writing material.

Plus, let's face it, those firefighting skills might come in handy again someday. 

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