As promised I am back again, this time with all the gory details of the rest of the hospital stay. I'm not suggesting it will be amusing or even comfortable to read, but just brutally honest, maybe a bit gross at times, but this blog is here to provide information to those who are interested, and as a release to me.
This post covers Sunday, Jan. 20th through Wednesday the 23rd, the day I was discharged. I keep wanting to say "released" like it was some kind of prison, rather than "discharged". Maybe it was. The comments in here are a bit all over the place, but I think it covers just about everything.
Roomies - Ha ha (or LOL to you texting maniacs) - certainly entertainment in its rawest form. By the way I was in a 3-bed ward. This was not so much of a problem as everyone in there was not in any condition to care.
Ray, an 85 year old in for a hip pinning, snored, coughed and complained his way through every night. He pressed his buzzer about every 20 minutes for meds, bedpan and subsequent bedpan cleanup and subsequent bedpan damage control, or to fix up his sheets which either got kicked off his bed or twisted around his feet. The sheet thing was understandable because he also had an unrelated groin injury which caused him a lot of pain and thrashing around. It was like Jekyll & Hyde. In the daytime other than needing assistance in and out of bed to his wheelchair, or onto the commode, he was most pleasant and talkative, and was so outgoing that he would glide over uninvited and join just about any conversation I was having with guests. Once when Kathy, a former Ottawa neighbour was visiting he stuck his nose in and I told him that I fully expected his being able to keep a secret from my wife about a visit from my old girlfriend. He kind of did a double-take and eventually slinked off. Later I saw hime in the hallway after another "girlfriend" vist by Kathy, and reminded him "what goes on in the hospital, stays in the hospital". Obviously I'm not capable of following my own advice. Thanks for playing along Kathy. (wink-wink)
Jim, also 85 or so was in for a hip replacement. The complete opposite of Ray, he never complained about a thing. The only time his buzzer was pushed was when he needed to use the commode. I still haven't completely figured Jim out. At first I thought he had some dementia, or Alzheimer's. Every time a nurse came in he would ask things like "Who are you?", "Are you my daughter?", "Where's my car?" and on and on, laughing as he said it, causing the nurses to laugh as well. He must have had a giant sense of humour (at least in his head??) because chuckled about just about everything, and always had a grin on his face. He said and did little things that also caused his wife to laugh. But maybe they were both a little crazy - who knows. On the last day and a half he was there he was completely normal, except for the occasional chuckle, which kind of raised my spirits I'll have to admit.
After JIm was pardoned, I mean discharged, he was replaced by Marsha, and I'd have to guess also around 85. Marsha had a knee replacement. There's not too much to say other than she must have had a different ringtone on her cellphone for each of her (seems like hundreds) of her contacts. Well, there was this "Help, can someone please help me?" soft plea that arose every few hours. I must have told her 3 or 4 time to push the call button on her lap, as did every nurse or other person in the area or coming to her assistance. The funny thing was sometimes she was pushing the morphine button as it turned out, eventually resolving the problem for everyone else around. Marsha made no bones about how crappy the food was, and she was very well spoken and articulate which made it impossible for anyone to come back with a good counter-argument. She was right by the way about the food, but then again, you all knew that.
I think I need to break this up into a serious of smaller posts, because the more I write the more comes to mind.
Later.
P.S. #1 - the use of acroynyms/abbreviations predates you texting/messaging punks by several years. In fact, back to the days when there were only dialup modems, BBSs and Usenet newsgroups - long before the World Wide Web was conceived, and probably back to morse code, teletypes, etc..
P.S. #2 - If you think ROTFL always meant "Rolling On The Floor Laughing", you may be interested to know, that before it was sanitized by the Politically Correctness Police, it actually stood for "Right Out To F***ing Lunch" and was used to describe a person or opinion that was utterly ridiculous.
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