Okay, so that whole hospital trip was a fucking nightmare. The bed I was given had no padding left on the mattress, so the three movable plates underneath the mattress were pressed against various points on my body. Furthermore, the top and middle plates weren't quite aligned with each other, so there was absolutely no position on the bed that did not violently poke directly into my left buttock. I tried putting a pillow under my ass, but the plate was hard enough that it still poked through the pillow. Thus, aside from rare moments of medicine-induced sleep, I was in extreme discomfort in places other than my actual infection, so much so that I was having difficulty differentiating between the two.
Next: my room was not designed for two beds. I have been in a bunch of rooms on the same floor of this hospital, including the one next door. This one was a good 40-50 square feet smaller. That meant there was only about 12" between my bed and the curtain on one side and about 18" between my bed and the wall on the other side. I know from talking to nurses that there are literally floors of empty rooms in this building, so this isn't a constraint of space driving the need to put two patients in a one-patient room.
Next: this hospital's sister hospital across town is supposed to take all psychiatric patients. That apparently didn't include the senile old lady down the hall, who sang and clapped loudly throughout the night every night. She forgot the words to most of the songs about five or six words in, so she'd play out the tune with enthusiastic shouts of "Hey!", "Fuck!", or "Michael Jackson!". According to the nurses, there was nothing they could do to stop her because she didn't have the mental capacity to know she was even doing it in the first place. Well, that means she's at the wrong hospital.
Next: I don't know what drug users see in it, but hallucination isn't fun. Thursday afternoon I started hearing things that weren't there. I would doze off, then wake up to what I thought was the sound of my dad's voice. When I looked up, he would be engrossed in something he was reading or asleep in the chair. By midnight I started to be suspicious that the heavy dosage of dilaudid combined with no food might be the source for my rapidly increasing perceptional complications. When the nurse came around with my 2AM dose, I asked her if she could give me 1mg instead of the full 2, and I explained to her my reasoning (or at least I think I did). She said it was all or nothing. I opted for all. When my 4AM dose was due, I declined. Too late. Every time I shut or even blinked my eyes, I would find myself thrust into a very intense conversation with someone whose logic train I could not follow. This would jar me back awake, usually only a few seconds later. My body was so exhausted, however, that I really couldn't keep myself awake. I started seeing people in the room, only to focus my eyes and find that nobody was there. Around about 6AM I became violently ill and called in the nurse. I told her I felt like I was going to vomit. She nonchalantly advised that I was "certainly welcome to do so", proceded to change my antibiotic bag, then told me she'd be back in a bit--while I was vomiting. I don't know what normal protocol is in that situation, but if a patient isn't a puker, isn't the nurse supposed to stick around to see what happens next?
So now I'm home, possibly earlier than I should be, but I just don't care. I wasn't receiving anything resembling treatment, and if I'm going to be miserable I'd rather be miserable in my own bed.
