Last time I was in the hospital, it was for three days after a horseback riding accident. I couldn’t wait to get home. It was grindingly dull, no tv, no phone (I didn’t have a cell phone), though meals must have been okay, because I don’t particularly remember them. They were checking my vitals every three hours, and I was being woken up during the night, so I wasn’t sleeping well either. Even though I wasn’t in a lot of pain, I would request meds, just so I could sleep and pass the time. Plus my dogs were being cared for by a friend, for which I am very grateful, but I was anxious to get home to them.
Prior to that, I spent the weekend following knee surgery.The nurse call station was near the room, and the call signal sounded like a phone ringing. All night long.
The patient in the other bed, moaned, cried and snored the entire night. I felt bad for her. The last day, her entire extended family came to visit - adult children, grandchildren, siblings, friends…all day long a parade of people in and out, loud, staying too long, bumping into my bed, and being outright rude to me. I had a meltdown, threatened to choke the old bitch, was willing to fight the adult daughter who was particularly nasty to me, and then broke down in tears. A nurse had to come, shoo away all the visitors and take me for wheelchair ride to calm down. I was sick, in pain, and just wanted to rest and get better. I was beyond happy to be sent home the following day where I could be alone, and in peace.
Another vote for HELL NO. One of the worst parts is getting awoken every three hours or so for blood draws, IV changes, the cleaning person, etc.
I have told everyone in my family that should my time come, I want to die at home, in my own bed. I’ve had two aunts that passed away in the last couple of years who did just that, and were at peace at the end.
No, no, no. Only time I’ve stayed overnight was after I had an emergency C-section. I was too uncomfortable to enjoy just about anything and my new baby never slept, but the constant middle-of-the-night activity would have stopped me from sleeping anyway. And the food wasn’t very good.
No, no. Hospitals are where you pick up infections and I want to stay as far away as possible. I was in a hospital for 6 days 12 years ago and hated every minute of it. The food was awful, I had an IV drip constantly, I didn’t sleep well and so on.
But if you don’t mind a hijack, I wanted to say a few words about the difference between hospitals then and now. In the “bad” old days (and today, in Canada, where my six days were), hospitals were non-profits. In my experience, they were either run by religious institutions (I was born in a hospital called Presbyterian), teaching hospitals (my appendix was removed at Jefferson, part of Jefferson Med School), or municipalities. When my appendix was removed in 1950 (date fixed in my mind because it happened six weeks after my bar mitzvah) the room rate was $8/night, basically covered by Blue Cross, the latter also a non-profit 67 years ago. The food was awful and conditions spartan. Nowadays, US hospitals are huge profit-making organizations with luxurious accommodations, fine food, etc. They take out full page ads in the the NY Times magazine. Their executives are paid like GM executives (that is doubtless an exaggeration) and they have a whole army of medical “coders” whose job is to figure out how to run the bill up as high as possible. There is an opposition army of medical coders working in every insurance company whose job it is to oppose the first. If you want to work out why health care is so expensive in the US, this is one of the first places to look at (but not the only one).
Sorry for the rant, but medical coverage is the reason my wife and I feel we cannot move to the US to be near one of our kids.
Nope. I can sleep and get food delivered at home. And yeah, hospital food isn’t so bad. Unless your reason for being in the hospital means you don’t get the full menu. Then it can really suck. The last time I was laid up, I had a diet of IV bags for the first few days and then broth for the next couple. Not exactly a culinary adventure.
I did once perform a monologue about a man who had saved up money to take a vacation in a hospital for the exact reason you’ve described, though, so you’re not entirely alone.
I hate hospitals so much that that last time I was in one, I left against medical advice less than an hour after I woke up from having my gallbladder removed. The only reason I’d go to one now is if the alternative was certain death. I’ll risk potential death.
I just spent a week in the hospital unexpectedly. I was fortunate that I had my laptop with me at the time, and that the hospital has good wi-fi. Without that, I would have hated it more. But even with that, I hated it.
That said, some major differences between my hospital stay and yours:
In my hospital, you need to pay for a TV. Lucky for me, YouTube has lots of stuff to watch, but I would not have minded the TV if I didn’t need to pay for it
I don’t know what your hospital bed is like, but mine was anything but comfortable. It kept shifting (inflating?) under me, and I could never just lie still without something around me moving
I only eat Kosher. Maybe the hospital has good non-Kosher meals, but Kosher hospital meals suck
Being hooked up to an IV is annoying
Constantly wanting information from doctors and having to almost always hear “We don’t know yet” or worse, the doctors not being around for hours to even ask
Yeah, my first thought was to ask how the cost of a hospital stay compared to the stay in a hotel with room service. It wouldn’t even have to be a luxury hotel to compare favorably to a hospital; even a Motel 6 would give you “your own TV to watch all day, sleeping if you want.”
I was going to say the same thing. The “feeling of being taken care and being pampered…having your meals delivered, having your own TV to watch all day, sleeping if you want” experience can be experienced far better by staying in any half-decent hotel. Which I love doing.
The last time I stayed in a hospital was to keep my wife company when our children were born. It wasn’t terrible as far as hospitals go. But it was still cramped and boring. I can’t speak to the food because I went outside to get my own.
I previously felt like Idle Thoughts, but after this last stay for cranial surgery I never want to do it again: bad food, hooked up for vitals all the time, insomnia and two words: foley catheter! No thanks.
The hospital can be nice for a few days, but I’ve had a couple of month-long stays, and it gets old after awhile. I’ve been subjected to blood draws at 4:30 am, breathing treatments at 3:00 am, being unable to get out of bed for the tubes in my chest and a PICC line in my arm. I’ve also been in a university teaching hospital where the attending physician would drop in with his interns following him around like a flock of ducklings. One time I was eating my lunch when the doctor came in and pulled my tray away from me so the ducklings could get closer to my bed, and he neglected to put my tray back where I could reach it. I had to ring for the nurse to give my lunch back to me. (I wasn’t pre-op, so there was no medical reason I couldn’t eat. It was just absent-mindedness on the part of the doc.)
As for TV, no cable. Just the three major affiliates, CNN, and maybe PBS. Maybe the Fox Network and the WB. That’s all. I’d do anything to stay out of the hospital.
I work in a hospital, albeit non-clinical. Let me tell you, there are lots of people who like the hospital. Usually they are psychotic and often times dangerous. We recently admitted a prison inmate who ate his shoe just so he could be admitted. This is not a hotel. You want peace and quiet, tv and wifi, check into a Holiday Inn.
I guess you are only supposed to post if you like hospital stays? Okay then, I will post about a friend. For some reason, she loves it. And she has been in a lot of hospitals. She is usually deathly ill when she goes. She says,“But they really pamper you!”
Yeah, when you’re in ICU, they “really pamper” you.
I developed the flu from being in the hospital, the only time I’ve ever had the flu in my life. And it was so bad, I developed pneumonia secondarily from the flu.
