Anyone got statistics on how many nurses are off work with bad backs after trying to help a heavy patient get up off the floor? I bet there are a lot.
I just finished an appointment with a doctor on the staff of another local hospital. He said that the original infection has not necessarily persisted; rather, through two lesions on my ankle, which had been oozing a smelly goo, new infections could very well have ENTERED the leg. He said the swelling inhibits the healing of the lesions, but the antibiotic helps matters 
Falls are one of the most common and costliest accidents in hospitals, and hospitals have greatly increased their attention to prevention efforts. Though they do want you to walk soon from a healing perspective, they absolutely don’t want you getting out of bed without assistance if you have any fall risk factors, of which there are many – administration of narcotics and many other drugs, lower extremity injuries or surgery, old age, dementia, etc.
The number one cause of falls in hospital resulting in injury (and therefore liability for the hospital) is a patient getting out of bed on his or her own to go to the toilet.
Most hospitals have ways to designate you a fall risk, with colored wristbands, signs on the door, notes on the chart, etc. Once they do that, they don’t want you getting up for any reason without assistance and unfortunately in some hospitals, that means ordering you to use a bedpan because they don’t have enough staff to respond quickly to every call for assistance.
I’m pretty sure they designated you a fall risk because of your leg problem, even if the IVs were in your arms and they didn’t tinker with the leg.
(I know a lot about this because I write a publication for hospital risk managers, the administrators who lose sleep at night thinking about you getting out of bed, falling, and suing the hospital for a million dollars.)
Yep. I wondered for the longest time why they always had an orange piece of paper with the outline of a maple leaf on it on my door whenever I was in the hospital or nursing home. That’s one way to designate a “fall” risk (get it? FALL!?).
In the U.S., hospitals also get “dinged” for falling injuries by JHACO and the government CMS.
On Day 3 following my heart surgery, I wanted to see whether I could get a drink of water on my own. So I sat up (took about 5 minutes), figured out how to lower the railings, and began to swing my legs down to the floor. Alarms went off, and a swarm of professionals came to my “rescue.” They thought I had fallen out of bed. They left me with the railings back up, and the bed raised practically all the way to the ceiling. It took me no time at all to crack the code, and return the bed to its normal position.
The following day, I was allowed to get out of bed and move over to a chair.
I still have the plastic “FALL RISK” bracelet I was forced to wear.