Hospital

It is our third time here this month, (for this 2^nd round of EPOCH chemo, and after the 1^st round of chemo and my emergency hospitalization with fever) so we gained some experience, and I will share some general experiences.

I am naturally hospitalized in the “cancer ward” (and intend to re-read the famous Solzhenitzin’s masterpiece by the same name I read and loved as a kid soon). It is an amazing unit, with especially professional nurses who at the same time are all extremely nice and and have a small patient / nurse ratio load and plenty of time for each. You see your own doctor on top of general hospital doctors. The hospital is brand new, with a very spacious suite for each patient  (so much so that a couple of years ago when Edna was here for a minor procedure, just after we became empty-nesters and talking about down-sizing, I suggested we move in to such a unit permanently…).

So what can an Israeli complain about (without it, your citizenship might be taken away…). Easy to find some.

1)    Beds: Clearly top of the line hospital beds. But coning with an air mattress that can flow air to reduce possible bed sores, and leave it pretty deflated most of the time. This is bad for many with normal backs, let alone with someone having a compression fracture in L2. Anyway, Edna found and bought a foam topper for it that greatly helps me. Moreover, a great discovery was that you can manually set it to “max-inflate mode” (which however lasts only a ½ hour or so till the next wave of anti-bedsores wave deflates it again).

2)    Beeps: My EPOCH chemo has several ingredients, one of which is somewhat fizzy (it also looks like orange soda – it reminded me of Agent Orange…) which tends to create air bubbles in the IV lines, that cause the IV machine to immediately call the nurses at a high pitch and volume beeps. They fix the lines a bit – wonders of modern technology. Needless to say, this starts happening for some reason only in the wee hours of the night, just after you managed to fall asleep from the previous episode…Hospital nights….

3)    Temperature: Each suite is of course equipped with its own thermostat, however, neither patients nor nurses know how to manage them, and they have a life of their own. Yesterday it picked a comfortable arctic 65 degrees…at night, while my body was well covered with blankets, I felt for the first time some negative aspect of my new, bald hairdo (see below, comparing to the one of the first round, when I had hair…)