A few etiquette suggestions for those who share a hospital room with another, unrelated patient:
- If you want to watch a television show, watch it. Otherwise turn the damn thing off. In particular, do not leave it running 24 hours a day.
- …especially not tuned to the “All yelling/all haranguing, all the time” channel.
- Limit to a couple visitors at a time. No poorly supervised children! This is a post-surgical ward and we don’t want the source of infection.
- Visitors, especially children, should not use the patient’s bathroom; there are bathrooms in the hallway for visitors.
- It’s a small room; lower your voices! One person talking at a time, not five. For hours at a time.
- No bucket of fried fish in a room with two post-surgical patients who are not allowed to eat.
- Something tells me other points will occur to me in the next few days.
My Korean mother-in-law was visited by her Presbyterian Korean church group. They warbled the worst Protestant hymns from my Southern Baptist childhood – all in Korean. Count your blessings that at least you’re not in that fresh hell.
Damn, that’s brutal. I’d be calling in the charge nurse and escalating from there if she can’t whip the hillbillies into shape. Don’t know any one at BroMenn, but if you are at OSF let me know. My sister can straighten things out there.
Clay – LOL! I got a good laugh out of that story, thanks. I guess it can always be worse.
Things are much better now. I took a gentler approach through the day and it seems to have worked. They must have realized or the older members of the group straightened them out – granpaw is recovering and can’t take all this noise! It’s ten pm and my roommate just asked me if the TV was bothering me. A much appreciated question.
Well, keep taking notes but I hope you are not in there long enough to to write a hospital etiquette book. My Dad said that all the aggravation in a hospital was planned. Make the patients angry enough and they will get well on their own just to get the hell out. Then the hospital takes credit and, of course, wants to be paid.
The world certainly functions better when we strive to work with others rather than against them. Glad to hear you are getting better… again…
I had the “intense” experience of sharing a semi-private hospital room in the 70’s with an interesting octogenarian who was fixated on Bob Keshan (the infamous Captain Kangaroo). As I was recovering from a pedestrian-vehicle accident, me being the pedestrian-my cohort in the next bed got her daily fix of the Roo-Man at some ungodly hour every morning. And being 80, she needed the volume cranked up to…11. It’s difficult getting too wrankled on someone who puts her teeth in a glass, and has probably kicked some *ss in her 80-plus years on the planet. But, seriously there wasn’t enough morphine in the world to deal with Mr. Green Jeans, Dancing Bear, and the inevitable moans of delight my neighbor would utter at the mere sight of the “Captain”. Thank God we had a curtain. I thought that might have been a signal of the coming apocalypse. Oh, how very young I was then.
Glad to hear you are back on the homefront George. Good to know things are improving.