Why is it that with all their knowledge and experience, doctors and nurses have failed to learn the most important thing of all: patients need sleep!!!
During Tim's recent hospital stay for knee surgery, we probably got a combined total of fifteen minutes sleep, and only because we took turns distracting the staff. At one point, I seriously considered trying to find a nice, quiet slab in the morgue for a quick catnap, but figured the autopsy would probably only wake me anyway.
All night long it was a constant procession of people in and out of the room, unless Tim needed something. Then, they became as hard to find as a Khardahsian at an Amish convention.
Every five minutes, someone was parading through the room like a Miss America contestant working the main runway.
Hi! I'm Becky/Mary/Julie/BettyJo/BobbyJo/BillyJo/John Boy/Jim Bob. I'll be your nurse/nurse's assistant/nurse's aid/nurse's mechanic/nurse's accountant/nurse's hairdresser. My job is to keep you up all day and night until you're so sleep deprived you'll confess to having aided and abetted Benedict Arnold, John Wilkes Booth and Tony Soprano just so you can be executed and get some rest.
I will also wait until you are delirious with pain before bringing you drugs, then demanding you tell me your name, rank, serial number, shoe size, favorite teacher and earliest childhood memory before letting you have them.
If you can answer all of the questions successfully, I will then ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, bearing in mind that 10 is an unacceptable answer and I will continue to harass and browbeat you until you either cry or give up. One is also unacceptable because we don't actually want you to be pain free since that would diminish our control over you. Three is the magic answer, but only after the meds have actually kicked in. If you say it now, it means you don't really need the drugs and are just being a whiny cry-baby.
Even after Tim was sufficiently medicated and possibly drifting off into a restful, healing slumber, the procession continued.
Okay! It's me again, Nurse NoDoze. Just wanted you to know that I will be taking your pulse and blood pressure every fifteen minutes. I am going to leave the monitor clipped to you, so all I have to do is tiptoe in and read the results on the machine without disturbing you, but instead I will wake you up out of a peaceful slumber to share the results and reassure you that you are neither dead nor in a coma. It is crucial that you know what your vitals are, since, if there is a problem, we may need you to scrub in on your own operation.
Oh, and every seven minutes, I will either want to discuss your physical therapy schedule, lunch menu for tomorrow, urine output, Super Bowl team stats, what's new at the box office and whether Brad and Angelina should have more children.
And, every three and a half minutes, I will be in here haranguing you about the need to keep your knee from stiffening up. I will take away the machine that they gave you after surgery which moves it for you, thereby letting you get some rest, and insist that you sit, stand, walk, enter a three-legged race and perform three triple-toe loops in a row.
If you complain about the pain and/or crumple into a broken heap at my feet, I will once again demand that you rate your pain, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Finally, around 3am, after forcing Tim to do laps around the nurse's station, Nurse Red Bull turned off the overhead fluorescent lights with their 2,000,000 watt bulbs and announced that he should really try to get a little sleep.
And she really did mean little, since at 5am, she was back flipping on the lights with a cherry, "Good Morning! Let's get started on a new day!"
And by new day, I mean a repeat of yesterday for you with the new shift while I go home and get some much needed sleep.
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