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Published: September 23rd 2013
Sunrise from a bed
It's great to wake up to a dawn like this. Indeed, it's great to wake up!Buildings are there for a purpose, be it hotel or hospital.
Hospitals aren’t hotels, but my recent experience says the service in hospitals is actually sometimes better.
It’s the people who make the difference.
The many grades of nurses have different, confusing uniforms.
Are they nurses? Are they registered nurses? Are they sisters? Are they matrons?
Can male nurses be sisters? (Apparently, yes, but they’re called charge nurses).
Whatever, or wherever they’ve come from, they all have infinite patience and skills.
They’re hard-working angels.
How they do it, I’ll never know.
A heart patient in the bed next to me is embarrassed that his monitor goes ‘Bing' 'Bong’, day and night.
If it stops, it means he’s dead.
Little old ladies with heads bowed wait in wheelchairs for a scan or an x-ray.
Agitated old men with bad haircuts, confused and disorientated, ask silly questions or call out loud for their wives, who are at home.
A woman limps rapidly down a corridor, one shoe on, the other in her hand.
Overweight women wearing fake tans and skinny leggings suffocating immense thighs visit their overweight dad who won’t give up cigarettes.
A woman of a ‘certain age’, with fake designer handbag, yellow hair in bizarre ragged style, bright red lipstick, mascara, frilly white blouse and very short skirt, totters on high heels to visit a loved one who’s fast asleep.
I never realised there were so many obese men and women, patients and visitors alike.
They struggle down long corridors, short legs striding and little arms outstretched trying to keep pace with their huge backsides.
A bushy-bearded man, dressed like a
Water, water, everywhere
I don't think I've ever drunk so much of the stuff! tramp all in brown, wanders out of the ward.
A smart tea-trolley enters, pushed by a smiling lady with missing teeth.
Cool and comfortable pyjamas are supplied, pale green for men, shocking pink for women.
Some men wear back-to-front theatre gowns that look like backless dresses when they get out of bed. Their bare backs and bums are part of hospital entertainment.
Chubby orderlies from all parts of the globe wear constant smiles.
Ward doctors: there are small Chinese ones; confident Scots ones pursued by timid mouse-like assistants in head-scarves; tall, bearded Pakistani ones; young Indian and Filipino ones; and even an occasional English one.
Romanian junior doctors struggle to keep pace with the doctor they're shadowing and with the unfamiliar paperwork.
Phlebotomists and pharmacists are Polish.
I asked the sister on duty what language I'd overheard her speaking to one of her male colleagues. It was Tagalog.
Large, round-faced Chinese nurses, male and female, seem to be on permanent night shift – perhaps because their English is almost incomprehensible and they won’t have to talk to sleeping patients.
It’s a veritable United Nations when all
Still life at dawn
Well, there aren't many bowls of glistening fruit on hospital windowsills are there? this lot’s on duty at the same time.
One of the friendly Indian male nurses, a rare Punjabi Pentecostal Christian, is praying for me.
The cleaners are employed by G4S.
The same company transports prisoners and provides electronic tagging of offenders.
Bottles of hygienic hand gel sit at the foot of every bed and beside every door.
It’s there to minimise the effects of that hospital curse MRSA –
most people choose to use it.
A window near my bed bears a piece of paper with the legend: ‘Do Not Open – Awaiting Repair – 4/10/12’.
They must have heard I was writing this blog because two workmen came to look at it today, 20/9/13.
They took away the piece of paper - then put it back, unchanged, half an hour later.
Some days the food’s great, some days it’s dire.
They forgot to put macaroni in the macaroni and vegetable bake.
The asparagus soup could have been leek and potato - or from a washing-up bowl.
I feared the corned beef and coleslaw salad, but it was
Thank goodness for loved ones
...and for a laptop to help take your mind off things. delicious.
The apricot tart was a mystery pud hidden beneath a morass of thick yellow custard.
Bread and butter’s freely available with meals. Toast isn’t.
The hospital's bedside book specifically states that toasters aren’t allowed to be brought in from home.
If the menu includes an orange, choose a yoghurt instead.
Plastic knives were never intended to peel oranges.
Strawberry yoghurts are grey.
A plastic clock ticks incessantly on the wall above.
Somewhere, there’s a constant, annoying ‘beep’.
Beds are electronically adjustable - up, down, knees up, feet up, head up.
You could sleep like a letter ‘U’ if you wanted.
Like a hotel, bed linen’s changed daily – usually while you’re having yet another pee or turning the washroom into a swimming pool by taking a shower.
Even after my soaring temperature had subsided, the ward was often like a sauna.
The heating’s switched on in September and off in May, come rain, hail, snow or heatwave!
The miserable gent in the opposite corner doesn’t want the windows open. We wait until he goes to sleep!
There’s no Wi-Fi, a real nuisance. Some hospitals have it.
I’ll write – I’d have been happy to pay a reasonable charge.
It caused a nightmare with my emails and eBay selling.
Thanks are due to my wife and friends who dealt with things so well in my absence.
Perhaps we take too much for granted. It costs billions of pounds a year to run a health service like this. They try very hard to save your life - for free. I think that’s terrific value for money! I usually end my blogs with details of where to stay.
Not this time!
The NHS budget for 2012/13 is around £108 Billion, or £3,000 a second. Free treatment is for UK residents only, of course. Overseas visitors needing their lives saved, may have to pay!
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Janet Blay
non-member comment
Hospital
Hi Mike, hope you are well and that your hospital stay wasn't too long. Another great blog, maybe you should send this to the PM. Take care hope everyone is well. Love Janet x