The adventures of a hospital stay

First, let me say you can alter your prayers for Barbara to emphasize praise and thanksgiving for her good surgery and repair. She returned home yesterday, the day following surgery. She is in pain (as the doctor promised) so ask the Lord to be merciful in this regard too.

She got her good night's sleep last night, the first since Tuesday night. Wednesday, we had to get to the hospital at 5:30 a.m., so we got out of bed at 4. That was after staying up late getting prepared to spend a couple days at the mercy of the hospital staff. Then there is the notorious night following surgery. At one in the morning they came in to take an xray of Barbara's lungs. Then later they came in to take her vital signs (okay, maybe that is a necessity), not once, but twice. Someone came to draw blood for the lab. Then there was the glucose test. Of course her door had to be immediately across the hall from the nurse's station where they chat and bang around--all of which becomes magnified decibels of disturbance in the evening environment. She was confronted with the additional aggravation of noise from the vacuum chute which they use to communicate with the pharmacy. She had to ask one of the disturbing nurses about an especially annoying clang, and was told that one of those vacuum capsules was dropped on the floor. It rang out like John Henry driving steel.

Musing on hospital stays, I remember once (admittedly long ago) I was actually awakened and asked if I wanted a sleeping pill! Oh yeah, and there was a nurse's station across the hall from me too where I heard a male nurse trying to make time flirting with the female nurse all night.

All in all this stay was not the nightmare Barbara experienced when she was in for her shoulder surgery. That was the time she asked for pain meds a few hours following surgery, and the nurse refused to give her anything because she could not find in the computer any directions from the doctor for this. When Barb's pain began to get mega severe this same nurse became brusk with her, again refusing meds. Eventually she was attended to, but only after the pain got ahead of the meds (medical speak for too hard to handle with meds). Eventually the meds caught up with the pain and she did okay. Don't they teach you in nursing 101 that pain medications are indicated in the hours immediately following major surgery?

Well frankly she had nothing but competent, caring nurses this time. One of them even repaired the bandage over Barb's incision that the doctor botched and let it leak. We enjoyed her so much that we actually gave her a written commendation. She was so overjoyed to find that BL is a piano teacher and lives in Lakewood. She lives near enough that she wants to go back to learning piano, and has promised to call for lessons.