As they're wheeling me on my hospital bed through the double doors of the Surgical Admissions Department I'm getting almost a feeling of deja vu. I'd been through those doors many times a few months back whilst my mother was in for tests. I knew they'd put me at the end of the ward as far away from the women's toilets as possible and sure enough they did. I was so dosed up with pain killers I really wasn't worried about where I was. I kept thinking "I can't walk, they have to look after me". Don't you believe it! 
This was a mixed ward but the women far outnumbered the men. However the men seemed slightly deranged and thought nothing of wandering around with their hospital gowns flapping in the breeze. Fortunately I didn't catch the view from my window seat, I was one of the lucky ones. I have a vague memory of one of the men wandering the ward at 5am. The nurse asked him what he was doing and he replied "sorry, do you want me to get dressed?". She bellowed back, "Nooooo, I want you to go back to bed, it's five in the morning and everyone else is asleep". Well we were until she opened her fat gob. Somehow it struck me as funny, must have been the pain killers.
It's all a bit of a blur but I do remember feeling that once out of A&E you become like just another piece of paper in the office that has to be looked at occasionally to remind the staff of the contents and then either put back on the desk or filed elsewhere. I slept a lot during the daylight hours because I knew from Mum's experience that I'd not get a wink of sleep at night. The nurses seemed on a mission to separate the women from the men, which also struck me as funny. If you needed a wee you'd have to have a pretty strong bladder because it took them an age to answer the emergency buzzer but they were moving beds around the ward like contestants in It's a Knockout! I don't remember much about this end of the ward because I was very quickly moved to the opposite end. Again I had the spot by the window - the only benefit being I wasn't sandwiched between two other patients. The view was of another part of the unimpressive building and the windows were permanently open because the rest of the patients constantly complained of being too hot. Never mind that I couldn't move out of my bed, my circulation was practically zero and I was getting colder by the minute.
I did my best to sleep through visiting time, which was 1-8pm. Mum had been with me all morning, she doesn't drive and my sister lives miles from the hospital so I didn't expect visitors. It was bedlam to say the least. I seem to remember there was a two to a bed rule but now I'm wondering if that applied to the patients and not the visitors because everyone bar the old girl in the bed opposite and me had three or more. There was a shortage of chairs and they were being dragged from other bedsides and the family room in order to accommodate the visiting throng. Fortunately we had radio so I put my headphones on and drifted off to sleep with local radio pounding in my ears. Just goes to show how exhausted I was, normally I can't sleep with a clock ticking.
I was woken by the silence. Any change in the lighting or sound level seemed to disturb me. I must have taken the headphones off at some point, perhaps the noise of the chatter was preferable to the sound of the latest indie band. One solitary visitor stayed until the bitter end. He sat with his pretty wife who did nothing but moan the whole time. I kept looking at her wondering how she managed to look so good considering she'd just come back from having her appendix removed. I also wondered how long this newly married couple would last if she continued to be such a bossy, miserable bitch. She complained about the food, the nurses, the lack of information, the senile old woman who kept letting out the blood curdling screams in the next section of the ward. He just looked at her adoringly, went to the cafeteria and fetched her a sandwich. He stayed with her until the bell indicated it was time to leave, kissed her tenderly and even then returned with another gift for her. I'm not one for jealousy but a wave of envy washed over me. I'm not one for being lonely but during that moment I felt truly lonely for the first time in a very long time.
Even though it was clearly time for all patients to be getting some sleep, the lights remained on until 11pm and even then they were just lowered a little until much later. The curtains weren't drawn around the beds. Figuring this was hardly an emergency worth buzzing for I struggled to the edges of the bed, pulled one across the window and the one between me and my neighbour. It felt a little cosier though the light was still blazing in my eyes. It was fairly quiet on the ward apart from the nurses feet tip tipping past from time to time and their idle chatter at the nurses station half way along the ward. I closed my eyes and lay as comfortable as I was likely to get and breathed a huge sigh. The quiet was almost soothing .... for about five minutes. Then the equipment attached to the lady six beds down on the other side of the room started to beep loud enough to wake the dead. Clearly it didn't mean she was dying because it took a nurse more than 5 minutes to come and adjust it. Just as I was dozing off again the old dear in the bed opposite let out a huge fart which vibrated so hard against the mattress I feared for the state of the sheets afterwards. Again there was peace and as sleep was about to overwhelm me she began to snore so loudly and repeatedly Mozart could have used her as a metronome. I can laugh about it now but at the time it was so frustrating. There was nothing to do but sleep - I'd read the newspaper cover to cover, the radio kept me awake, so I screwed some tissue paper up and stuffed it in my ears. Old Lady Farter's snores managed to penetrate the tissue paper without any difficulty and without even thinking I heard myself saying "For f***'s Sake!" a little louder than I fully intended. To my amazement it worked, no one objected or laughed so I decided I must be the only one awake. Each time she snored I let out a cough or a moan and she stopped snoring for a while. It was like a battle of wills and I'm not sure which one of us won. I did manage to snooze between beeps, farts and snores, not to mention Gladys's bloody curdling cries as she fought her demensure demons. The Doctors do their rounds after 10pm and some were even taken to surgery as late as midnight. I was so glad I'd slept throughout the day or I would have been as mental as Gladys by this time.
.......... to be continued 
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| Sleepless In Surgical Admissions |
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