G'is your awful hospital stories.....

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I had a minor operation yesterday (turbinectomy and septoplasty if you really wanna know) and was admitted for an overnight stay post-op.

So after a brief stay in recovery got trundled up to share a ward with five old ducks. They were all still pretty out of it from their own operations (eyes) and I thought all would be sweet.

But come 8pm, the auld bitch in the bed next to mine started snoring, LOUDLY.

(That’s OK…I’m a snorer too, that’s why I was in there having that surgery. I forgave her the snoring, at first…)

But then she started punctuating the snoring with the most disgusting and LOUD coughing fits…sounded like she was coughing up a galvanised iron rubbish bin full of rocks. Scared the fuck outta me.

And then she started having apnea attacks…she’d go reeeeeally quiet for a minute or more, then KAPOWEEE…a nuclear-level snore, or a cough to dislodge the most tenacious of intestines. Fark.

What else you say? There must be something else!

She talked in her sleep the whole fucking night, between coughing, snoring, and not breathing.

I managed 20 minutes shuteye between 4.30 and 4.50 am whereupon I gave up and got up.

At 6am, she took a call on her mobile and I heard her exclaim to the caller:

And she was in for an eye operation?? Hasn’t anybody ever told her what she sounds like at night? Bugger the eyes…somebody discombobulate the rest of her please??

:cool:

2

Yipes! So glad my four-night stay in December I had my room to myself. For what that’s worth what with people in and out all night and day. My overnight nurse tried to keep it to every 4 hours, but then respiratory therapy showed up a few times, too. And during the day, wow so many people - a lady with newspapers/magazines/playing cards, a minister/counselor, skin therapy people, residents, surgeons, student nurse, regular nurse, cleaning staff, food delivery - I don’t know how I managed to get to the bathroom uninterrupted, and I was in there every couple hours with all the fluids I was on!

Anyway, hope you’re already feeling better, and it sounds like the surgery went well, so there’s that.

3

I spent one night in the hospital a few years ago. There were beeping monitors right outside my room going all night, couldn’t sleep at all. They wanted me to stay another night but in the morning I told them I wanted out.

4

Should have added, the hospital is a public specialist Eye and ENT centre, so it’s wards all the way. No private rooms here.

Most procedures are done as day-surgeries, but some of us get the privilege of staying overnight*…anything longer would see you transferred to a General Hospital as obviously serious complications or infectivity would have set in.

*Privilege my arse. Never again. :smiley:

5

I just spent 4 nights in the hospital after tearing my patellar tendon.

Bedpans were a shock; I was so glad when I was cleared to shuffle to the bathroom!

There’s not much more annoying than someone showing up at 3 am to draw blood from you.

6

Well, there was the time after a miscarriage when the nurse came in and asked my roommate and me where the babies were. :frowning:

Another time, after surgery, my roommate and I decided we both wanted a nap. So we closed the door for some peace and quiet. An idiot nurse (most of them were angels) SLAMMED open the door and proclaimed that “This door must be open at all times!!!” So why have a door at all then? This was only one of several idiocies.

In contrast, on my most recent hospital stay, the floor I was on had a policy of “quiet time” at night. Really. Nobody woke me up for anything. Of course I was only there for a recalcitrant nosebleed; I’m sure if it was medically imperative they’d have wakened me.

7

While awaiting surgery for a thyroid tumor I was given the pre-op shot for an obese woman in the next room who was getting gastric bypass surgery. Our weight difference was hundreds of pounds.

A nurse made the mistake of walking in and saying right in front of me, “Oh no! You didn’t just give her that did you?” That was alarming.

Somehow I managed to stay awake and deliver the message of my overdose to the anesthesiologist. Didn’t really trust them to get that done at that point.

8

Kambuckta, it may very well have been her best night’s sleep ever, if whomever she sleeps with at home nudges her awake when she snores.

9

[QUOTE=kambuckta]

I managed 20 minutes shuteye between 4.30 and 4.50 am whereupon I gave up and got up.
[/QUOTE]
You have mistaken a hospital for a place where one can expect to get rest.

Between nurse/physician/technician visits, fire alarms, loud visitors, overhead pages, beeping monitors and the proclivities of fellow patients, it’s a mystery how inpatients get any sleep.

10

I used to get kidney stones. No fun at all, but I finally started drinking enough water on a daily basis, and I haven’t had a stone in 15 years (knock on wood).

Stone #2 came on in the middle of the night, about 20 years ago. I was living in Oak Park (just west of Chicago), and drove myself to Oak Park Hospital, where I went to the emergency room. When I got there (at about 1 a.m. on a weeknight), I was the only patient in the ER.

After the initial exam, they sent me to radiology for an x-ray, to see if they could locate the blockage. I was in radiology for about a half-hour, at which point they wheeled me back to the ER.

During the time that I’d been in radiology, another patient had been admitted to the ER. He was probably in his 20s, and he was suffering from a torn foreskin. :eek:

Based on the conversation that he was having with the nurse (female) and the ER doctor (also female), the story apparently was this: he had been having sex with a woman in the back seat of his car, when the injury occurred. He then proceeded to kick the woman out of the car, and drive to the hospital.

The doctor (a tiny Filipino woman) was trying to figure out exactly how the injury had occurred, as she was stitching the guy’s manhood back together. As the ER only had curtains separating the bays, I could hear the entire conversation.

“Were you having vaginal sex?”
“Urrrrrrrrgh!”
“Were you having dry sex? Like, between her thighs?”
“UrrrrrrrrrrghhH!”
“Now, you will heal up just fine, but you cannot have any sex for the next two weeks. You cannot even have an erection in the next two weeks, or the stitches will tear. Do you understand?”
“URRRRRRGH!!”

At that point, I guess I didn’t feel too bad, only having a kidney stone. :wink:

11

I never win these. I have a friend who always trumps me on medical horror stories. He broke his leg (femur) in basic training and spent the next 6 weeks in the hospital. For 3 weeks he was in traction and every morning the nurse would throw open the doors to the ward and bang against his traction weights. He would wake up screaming and the nurse would say “Oh, did I hurt you?” Every day for 3 weeks.

Worst I ever had was a couple of sleepless nights when The Boy was born.

12

Basic training many years ago.

The whole Fort got some kind of crud. Massive restrictions on everyone. Had to have 105 or higher temp to even go to the hospital.

I was standing inspection & woke up in a hospital bed. ( I had passed out & had a 106 temp. ) Anywho, was in a large open bay with maybe 15 other troops. After lunch, a Captain MD came in, SHE was the hottest red haired woman I have every seen EVER to this day.

In three seconds every guy in there had a little tent over his genitals. Unfortunately I was about #3 to the right from the door. Why was this bad you ask?

Because she just laughed in the most sexy voice I had ever heard and started around the room flicking each tent pole. IEeeeee !!!

By the time she got to #4 ( I was in bad pain so I can’t remember for sure ) every tent in there had lowered their flag pole. If we had not been so sick or she hadn’t been such a great person in how she took this ‘compliment’, it could have been real trouble. But she did the exact right thing.

Took a week before I was released and another week before the training could resume. It really fouled up a lot of things, advance training schools that had to be waited for to get in the next rotation, etc.

That was the last time I was ever in a completely open room also. Probably because they were having to use every place they could.

I will never forget my Doctor from that incident. Made up for being so sick.

13

I was in for a few days back in '10 - the story of my cellulitis encounter is elsewhere - and I did not sleep for about four days. By then weird things were happening, like when I closed my eyes my brain would start trying to dream while I was still perfectly well awake and I saw all these weird images, some of which I had part control over.

After a couple of days we were joined on the ward by a crim from the local prison who was trying to score himself a morphine hit and worked very, very hard to convince the staff he was very, very ill. I told that story too, in the Pit.

I was in with more of the same a year later - saw it coming the second time, but still had a two-day stay on the respiratory ward, or as I accurately predicted, the “coughing ward”. Feck. No sleep that time either, but I got home sooner.

14

I’m wondering if the eye surgery was to fix some damage done when a pillow was pressed over her face.

15

After I had my daughter, who was a c-section, I shared a room with another recent c-section delivery. She was Vietnamese, and didn’t speak English and had an emergency c-section without really understanding. The only people that could speak to her was her husband and his family who all visited after work until 8:00 pm and then would leave her alone. And she would start to cry. All day and night, softly weeping. It was heart wrenching.

To make things worse, apparently she had inverted nipples and couldn’t get the baby to latch on, so I could hear her baby wailing and the nurse trying to explain what to do to fix the issue.

And her husband would ALWAYS catch my privacy curtain as he walked by my bed, which was somewhat an issue when you are trying to nurse your new baby and don’t want an audience.

16

nm

17

Mentioned it here previously - trashed my back and was in traction, they stuck an 18 year old into a double room with some random little old lady. She had rented the room TV and so had control over it. I couldn’t have a radio, because during the day she had to watch her soap operas and if I played the radio, she couldn’t hear her shows. After 5 pm, they fed us dinner and then her friends came to visit until 9 pm, and I couldn’t play my radio because they wouldn’t be able to hear the conversation. At 9 pm she went to sleep, and if I played the radio she couldn’t sleep. After a week of this bullshit, I complained to my doctor and he finally managed to have me moved to my own room.

18

I’ve had three memorable roommates in the hospital.

  1. A young woman from Fiji, a mail order bride, who came to the states to marry a very old farmer who kept her at home as a captive. Every night she cried and masturbated herself to sleep.

  2. A drunken Lesbian who climbed into my bed while I was asleep and assaulted me.

  3. A woman whom, “nobody knows what’s wrong with me” who had huge, exhuberant nightly family reunions in our room.

You’d think once out of three times I could have scored someone unremarkable. I swear I wear an invisible sign. Have problems? Come sleep in my room.

19

With all the time I spent in the hospital with my liver and kidney failure, I have a lot of hospital horror stories. I can go into more detail for those who want, but here are some highlights:

-Families coming in to visit the roommate, when I had very few visitors, who insisted on loud conversation and stealing all the chairs in the room. This was one of the milder annoyances.

-Old men with incontinence problems who stank up the room. It happened several times; the nurses who were on the ball would leave me a bottle of air freshener, which didn’t always work.

-Roommates who insisted on falling asleep with the TV on blaring at full volume on some inane channel.

  • The nightly 4 am blood draw. Worse when I had so many marks they would search for a while to find a vein to use, and the ones who needed an arterial draw, which was much more painful. Somewhat solved by the use of a pic line, which eventually led to the catheter for dialysis.

-The roommates who wanted to talk and talk and talk, especially when I wanted to sleep.

-The time they put a man with an infectious disease in my room by mistake, and I had to ask the nurse to move either one of us. He was gone fairly quickly, though.

-The roommates who groaned in pain all night, or moaned and talked in their sleep.

-And of course the ones who brought great smelling outside food in, usually by their visitors, and ate it wafting the smells over to me. Especially bad when I was on a restricted diet.

After my transplants I was put on immunosuppressant medications, which dictated that I be given a private room to prevent infection. While in there alone, on the oxycodone they gave me for pain, I experinced waking dreams and vivid hallucinations of various people in my room, figurs in the shadows, things outside the window, that kind of stuff.

I can also add the housekeeping personnel with various odors, the nurses who didn’t care and the ill-trasined techs who had no respect for personal space or privacy, doctors who would drop in at weird times, and don’t get me started on the whole food system. That would be a whole rant on its own.

20

I had a microdiscetomy, nearly two years ago now, and wound up spending one night in the neurosurgery ward. God that place was depressing- I was the only one there for something like back surgery, everyone else was a brain surgery patient, and some of them were in a pretty serious condition. Serveral, including the woman in the bed next to me had been there for months.

Another elderly woman nearly died in the night; I was woken up by panicking nurses, as she started choking. She basically had no muscle control at all, and a ‘Do not escalate’ order, so they couldn’t do anything much. They suctioned her throat, I think, and she gradually started breathing properly again, but she clearly was never going to make it out of the ward, and one of the nurses started getting really upset about it all. Grim.

ON the lighter side, I managed to really freak out the tea lady- this place has a reputation, according to my doctor, for being great at medical care but rubbish at paperwork[sup]*[/sup]. The forgot to switch the previous patient in that bay’s name for mine, so when the tea lady came round, she read the sign, and said “Hello Mrs Notmyname! Would you like a tea or coffee?”
I didn’t realise she was talking to me, and carried on reading a book.
“Mrs Notmyname? Did you want a drink?”
I glance up, “I’m not Mrs Notmyname, I’m Myname.”
She checks the sign again, and starts looking round for a nurse in a panic, clearly convinced I’d lost my memory…

Those arm bands with your name on do come in handy :smiley:

[sup]*[/sup]They also had my discharge date listed as Feb 30th. The surgery went fine though.