Where I work, hospital staff is busy all of the time.  The nurses and CNAs aren’t  sitting around surfing the internet. They are truly working their asses off. However, despite their hard work, they have more things to attend to than they have time.  In addition, they see people like you every day. To them, you aren’t anything special. Even though you just woke up with an amputated arm, to the nurses, you are just another drugged up body lying in a hospital bed. You can’t be special to them, because then everybody would have to be special to them. 

This disconnectedness can be very cruel to the patient whether or not the situation actually is cruel. To treated as an animal, as a number, as a part of an assembly line.  The disconnectedness of the staff is compounded by the fact that you aren’t really behaving like a human. You are drugged up and miserable, and you look like hell.

Sometimes the disconnectedness can take a darker turn. It sucks and it breaks my heart to see people crushed by the potential (and rare at my place of employ) indignities of the hospital. CNAs who don’t pull curtains around when they help a person with a bedpan.  Patients in agony who have to wait for their pain medication because their nurse is on a break, and all the other nurses have their own emergencies.  It sucks, and in healthcare, things that suck, suck a lot more than it sucks in other industries. A barista handing you a cup of old coffee is a lot more forgivable than a nurse forgoing to change your bloody bed sheets because she was busy.

Customer service jobs are about prioritization.  You can’t make pizzas, take money, and bus tables at the same time. Nurses have infinite things to prioritize. And you are part of that list of things.  And you need to bump yourself up on that list. In addition you have to FIGHT to not be treated as a product.  You need to take an active role in humanizing yourself to hospital staff. 

Here’s what you can do to keep yourself from being treated like a lump of flesh while you lie in a hospital recovering from your surgery.

1.  Flowers – And the more the better. Trust me. This is the biggest signal to hospital staff that someone gives a shit about the patient.  I don’t care if your ailing mother has been in and out of the hospital for the last 5 years.   You need to send her flowers  --EVERY--TIME--  she is admitted. Flowers advertise that a person is actively loved. Nurses don't want angry friends and family. If you don’t have friends and family sending you flowers, send yourself some flowers.  It’s important.

(If this seams wasteful, buy plants instead of flowers then take them home afterwards.)

2.  Resist wearing the hospital provided gown and pants – But only if you can get away with it.   Bring and wear your own clothes. You might not be able to follow this if you have IVs and tubes hanging everywhere. But the point is that you don’t want to look like every other patient in that hospital. You don’t want to be just another miserable animal wearing a blue sheet with snaps.  You want to look like an individual. 

3.  Put up pictures of yourself when you were healthy – Bring in frames, and set them up around the room. Nothing humanizes a drugged up lump of flesh more than a picture of the same lump with makeup and pretty hair running around in a field with three kids.  If the patient is super, super old, pictures are especially important. 

4.  Act lucid – If you can. Don’t spend 8 hours a day staring into the hallway or watching TV.  You don’t have to act like an intellectual.  Just grab a People magazine about the royal couple and read it or just stare at William and Kate’s pretty faces.  Talk on your cell phone.  Play crossword puzzles and word finds.  Acknowledge people who walk into the room. It’s easy for a nurse to down prioritize a person who isn’t acting aware of their surroundings.

5. Know the names of the individuals on your patient care team  -- Ask for names when people come into your room.  When you ask, don’t be all cliché and say, “Awe, that’s such a pretty name.” Fifty people have already said that to your nurse this month.  Just look thoughtful and file the information away. Write it down. Use it.  I answer call buttons on a regular basis.  When a patient requests, “Please send Sheila to my room,” instead of “Can you call my nurse?” The effect is much more authoritative and indicates that the patient is aware of surroundings.

6. Insist on basics – If you smell, that’s bad. If your sheets haven't been changed in 4 days, that’s bad. If someone decides to change your diaper with the door open, that’s bad.   Asking for these things to be fixed doesn't make you needy, it makes you human. I’m sometimes appalled at how insecure patients can be in demanding they be treated well.  The patient care team has an infinite list of things to do, but you need to be an ACTIVE part of being at the top of that list.

In the end it boils down to – You will be treated better if you are lucid and loved. If you aren’t either of those things, do your best to fake it.

The other day I was posted on suicide watch at the hospital. Any time a person in the hospital threatens to take their own life, a staff member is assigned to watch them for the entirety of their stay at the hospital.

The RN on duty needed to take her lunch break, and since the patient can’t be left alone for even a second, I was lassoed into sitting outside this patient’s open door.   Instructions for this position are, “yell help if he tries anything” and “don’t ever leave this spot.” Done and done.  I sat in a comfy chair and played angry birds for 20 minutes.

Yes, that’s the entirety of the story. If you wanted it to be more interesting, shame on you.

At my volunteer job, I’ve been notified that I’ve been moved departments from pre/post op into the ICU. I start in June. 

Today we had our basic training.  No pushups involved. Major differences between the previous department and the ICU seem to be.

1.  There are three crash carts on the floor instead of one.  We’ve been instructed that our part as a volunteer in a code blue is to “get out of the way.”   “Getting out of the way” wasn’t covered in my CPR course, however.  So who knows how I’m going to respond.

2.  Visitors are monitored much more carefully.  The department is locked down. Visitors must be granted access, no children are allowed, and no more than two visitors at a time are allowed in rooms unless a patient is on their death bed.

3.  We REALLY are not allowed to have much patient contact in this department due to the critical state of the patients. Therefore, many of our duties seem to be more secretarial in nature.  That won’t make for good stories, but hopefully some drama will go down regardless.  Maybe I’ll get to tell a story about how we ran out of orange copy paper.

I visited my first med school. The Medical University of South Carolina. MUSC.

MUSC accepts mostly South Carolina natives. But they also will accept out-of-staters with “ties to the area.” Thankfully, I have an aunt and uncle and a set of awesome grandparents just sitting there in Charleston waiting to be my “ties.”  Also, with declining subsidies from the state, MUSC plans on increasing out of state admissions (because we pay more).

Our tour guide James had just finished his first year there and drove in special to give us a t0ur. Seems he owed the dean’s office a favor.  The campus was pretty deserted as the semester had just wrapped up, the first years had finished their finals and were on break for the summer.

He was a nice little talker and my BFF and I were aggressive with our question asking, so there was not a lot of down time in that hour long walk around campus. We saw some lecture halls, simulation labs, libraries, anatomy labs, and dining areas.

James was hesitant about taking us to the gross anatomy lab. He was like “Well, we don’t have any safety gear on. And if I get caught, I’ll be lectured cause I should have known better.” But he let us in anyway because that seemed like an essential part of a medical school tour.  The gross anatomy lab contained about 30 dead bodies covered in individual black tarps. I don’t know what I expected walking in there. But it was jarring.  He mentioned that some people find the gross anatomy lab an emotional place. And I was like, “yeah…” letting my voice trail off.   I found it more than a little disconcerting for sure.

I had  concurrently been reading a fictional book (The Good Thief) which was tangentially about a couple of men hired to dig up recently dead bodies so that a surgeon could teach his pupils about anatomy. Apparently, from 1742 till 1832, this was a relatively common practice.  The practice officially ended with the Anatomy Act in 1832 even though it wasn’t really legal to begin with.  Today, med schools are still not allowed to purchase dead bodies, and all specimens must be donated.

We asked questions about “the day in the life of.” Which he answered, “class from 8 to 12, lab till 4, study in the evening. But you get used to it.”  We asked about the cost of living, to which he replied, “Well, if you want to live in a NICE place, you could go over there next to campus and pay $$…” And he names a price that’s the exact same cost as the PoS apartment that I live in now (in Los Angeles). So at least if I get in to school in South Carolina, I can expect a decent living conditions upgrade from my current apartment for about the same price.

Charleston is beautiful and the med school school seemed great. The tour guide raved about how much the staff wants you to succeed. (Apparently 90% of the students have private tutors that are provided by the school (included in tuition)). My close family is nearby and so is their super cuddly miniature poodle.  The school is also decently close to my big sister, who I could visit on weekends.  And gaining entrance into this university seems attainable.  I could really be happy there. It’s fo sho going on the list of places to apply.

I had to help an 80 year old lady take a shower.  I didn’t have to wash her cause she was entirely mobile.  But they wanted me to sit there in case she needed help.  I really just had to open the soap bottles for her. And help her back into her clothes. This lady was a doll.

Before the shower, she had had a pair of hospital slippers on. Earlier, when she was trying to do the shower by herself, she had soaked the hospital slippers. So she asked for a second pair.

After the shower, we put a new pair of hospital slippers on her, but after about half an hour she hesitantly asked for a third pair of slippers saying that the slippers were kind of damp cause her feet hadn't been totally dry when we put them on.  But she looked scared when she asked. Like I was gonna slap her face and make a comment about her upbringing.

I was like, “Yeah, of course.”

And she said, “Everyone is going to be mad at me aren’t they.”

“What do you mean? No one cares how many slippers you take.”

“Well…I’m not sure. I think they are going to be upset.”

“Hey, it’s no big deal, we have lots of slippers.”

She still seemed really, really nervous. I tried to act nonchalant and brush it off as a silly worry. Cause it really is.

Then she asks, “You won’t tell anyone will you? That I’ve been using so many slippers?”

“I promise I won’t tell anyone. But really, no one cares.”

“Ok, but you won’t tell anyone?”

“No”

I thought this had settled it. I cleaned up the room a bit, putting the towels in the laundry, and making sure she had enough blankets, cause she was SO COLD.

As I was about to throw the slippers in the trash, she spoke up again.

“Could you put those in someone else’s trash. I don’t want people to know that they were mine. They’ll be mad.”

I imagined a bunch a accountants wearing protective goggles over their spectacles meticulously going through bio hazard bags that are labeled with room numbers. They pull out a pair of slippers with tongs and shake their heads in disgust. “That’s the 2nd pair,” they say before angrily adding another row to an excel file.

Well, if that’s what happens, then the person in the room two doors down is totally screwed.

A number of departments are in the basement of the hospital.

1. The Distribution Department for when I go on a run to get lice caps.
2. The Dietary Department for when I need to stock up on tea bags for the floor
3. The Cardiac Catheter lab for when I need to be reminded what a “warning radiation” symbol looks like
4. The Pharmacy for when I need to go grab some insulin for a nurse

So the basement is super creepy like you would expect a hospital basement to be. It has long hallways. It’s cold. It lacks any decorations save the diorama of the new hospital addition set to roll out in 2003. But regardless of just the general creepiness factor, I find the hospital basement terrifying an a very different level.

The walls of the basement are made of concrete, and we are in earthquake country.  In the picture below you can see earthquake cracks in the basement wall running about every foot down the wall. I can only show so much with this picture, but imagine these earthquake cracks for the entire length of the basement.  These cracks probably appeared during the last large earthquake in LA, and there is every reason to believe a much larger earthquake is on the way. Needless to say, I can do a pharmacy run faster than anyone else in that building.  I think about nothing else while I’m down there.

I know that technically, I could get crushed on the floor of the building where I work, but for some reason getting crushed in a basement seems so much worse than getting crushed on a middle floor.

How they convince dietitians and pharmacists to work down there is beyond me.  I would quit as soon as I saw the working conditions.

I volunteer at a hospital now, so I figured I’d start posting stories about my experiences there. Of course HIPPA compliant which basically means you as a reader shouldn’t be able to identify anyone I talk about via my descriptions. 

I started about three months ago, and I generally volunteer for 4 hours a week. I have to do about 280 hours total. So if you know math AND care, you can figure out how long I’m going to be doing this for.

The hospital is a standard community hospital, it’s not known for anything other than a couple appearances in movies.  It serves a rather poor district of LA, and it’s common to find that homeless people have snuck in during the night and taken up empty patient beds. I am assigned to a single department floor, and act as a runner for the floor. If someone needs something from the pharmacy, I’m the one who goes and grabs it, if a urine sample has to be taken to the lab, I go do that. If papers need to be delivered, if a patient wants socks, if a bed needs changing.  I have a decent amount of patient contact if I wish for it. I can help patients wash, feed them, take them on walks in circles around the floor if the doctor recommends that they get moving,  change diapers, help them order food, or listen to them cry about just being diagnosed with liver disease. I of course have no access to medications, needles, whatever, and I can’t help in a code blue. But I CAN say, “Hey, I think that guy may be choking.” (which happened)

One of my favorite things to do is to take the patients on  smoke breaks. The nurses of course don’t want to do this, cause it takes a while, and they are always over-busy. So like I get to have a little smoke break of my own, without the cigarettes and all the chit chat and camaraderie.  I wheel the patients down to this hidden area behind the hospital in the back of a parking lot and sit there for 20 minutes yapping while they suck down 3 cigarettes. The area is super camouflaged and hidden away, as if the hospital is embarrassed to have a smoking section.  Huh?

The day of daylight savings time, I helped change more than 200 clocks.  We did about one a minute, going in to each and every patient room in the hospital that we could get to before my shift ended.  Delivery rooms and operating rooms were top priority because apparently those are the rooms that care the most about the actual time.

I work in pre/post opp surgery. So anyone in the hospital who is there for a surgery will see my department both before and afterwards.  Normally, I don’t get to see any medicine happen as most patients are in a normal recovery period during their stay.  The program does department rotations, so next month, I could be transferred to a department which is more active, such as the ICU or labor and delivery.  There, there will be more of an exposure to doctors.  For right now, my main contacts are nurses, CNAs, and patients in a lot of pain (or nutty from morphine).  When you are confused as to why your 45 year old nurse is no longer dancing professionally, perhaps you are high.

One of the things I do is sit by the department phone and take calls from the patient rooms, and I dispatch the nurses via the pagers if a patient calls requesting pain meds or needs an IV changed. If a patient calls and wants orange juice, I’ll run and get them that.  This last week, a patient pinged the front desk from her call button and I picked up the phone. She said, “I need help in my room immediately.” Since she was right across the hall, I put down the phone and walked over.  This lady had recently had a hip replaced and wasn’t mobile. She looked at me frantically and said, “Can you grab me my purse, I need to place a bet on the Kentucky Derby. I was too late yesterday!!!” I was slightly not expecting this and was like, “Oh! oh, yeah of course,” and went and grabbed her purse while she explained that she had given up putting money in the stock market, and had decided that putting down a $150 dollars routinely on horse races was a better call because of her background in equestrian sports.

I also do a fair bit of medical record filing. Nothing special. Just taking in the lab reports from the day and filing them away in the gigantic patient binders. Coming off of a background developing for a technology consulting  firm, I was quite shocked at their genuinely archaic way of managing information. The room for data error is HUGE.  If I file an x-ray report under the blood results tab (as in a tactile file folder) instead of under the radiology tab (something that could totally happen), the information flow of patient care could be seriously interrupted. 

Well, that’s a general background of what I do at the hospital when I’m not sneaking down to the cafeteria to grab some free coffee.