I recently spent five days in the Hennepin County Medical Center, starting out in the Surgery Intensive Care Unit before moving to a regular patient bed. My experience reinforced one simple idea: take care of yourself and protect your health, because hospitals are lousy places to get healthy.
This isn’t a criticism of HCMC. The staff were uniformly professional and caring, doing their best to make sure I knew what was happening and what to expect next. If you’re going to have a significant health crisis, HCM is a pretty good place to wind up.
The problem was simply that you cannot do most “healthy” activities in a hospital. All the advice on how to take care of your body and mind goes out the window when you are recovering in a hospital bed. For example:
Get eight hours of sleep a night – this is almost impossible. Depending on what brought you to the hospital, the staff may be required to wake you as often as once an hour to make sure your conditions are stable. Even if the staff leaves you alone, you have monitors beeping and giving off light all night. The room has other lights too, to ensure the staff can see what they’re doing when they come in. You usually have various cords, cables, and tubes attaching you to the monitors and IV drips, which makes rolling over to get comfortable a logistical challenge similar to untangling the Christmas lights before you put them on the tree. If things are really bad, your roommate will snore.
Get plenty of exercise – I think I was the only patient that ventured out of my room for fun during my stay. Every other patient I saw was in their bed for their entire stay, other than one gentleman whose ability to walk was being assessed by a physiotherapist. For most patients, leaving their room meant being wheeled down the hallway in their beds. All those cables connected to the monitors made getting out of bed a challenge. Other than the physiotherapy clinic, there is no exercise equipment in a hospital, but most patients are in no condition to use exercise equipment. On day four I spent an hour walking laps of my floor because I couldn’t stand being in bed anymore.
Keep your mind active – Apart from a television, the hospital didn’t provide mental stimulation. There’s no library or book cart. You can’t do jigsaw puzzles on the tiny meal table in the room. They keep a curtain between you and your roommate, which discourages conversation. A television was the only mental stimulation available, and flipping through the channels reminded me of why I don’t watch tv. Hours a day of Judge Judy, game shows, home shopping channels, and talking heads discussing which football team to bet on is a great recipe for brain rot.
Practice good hygiene – This is my one real complaint about HCMC. Patient hygiene didn’t exist. I wasn’t given a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, or other basic hygiene products. I came in wearing contact lenses, and the staff was taken off guard when I said that my eyes were drying out after wearing them for 24 hours. Since they didn’t have a stock of contact lens solution or eyedrops, they wet my eyes using some saline solution that is normally injected into your arm. By the end of the second day, I simply threw the lenses away. I eventually took a shower, but only because I let them know I had been wearing the same shorts and hospital gown for four days, and that even I was starting to notice a smell. The shower itself was an interesting experience. It had no space to change or hang up clean clothes, and it opened directly into the hallway. I think it may have been a converted broom closet. In the end, they placed a chair in the shower to keep my clothes and towel off the floor and told me to be careful not to get them wet while I showered.
To be clear, I’m thankful that I got treated at HCMC, and it looks like I’ll make a full recovery. But if there’s anything you can do to avoid needing hospital treatment, do it, because once you’re in the hospital, the road back to good health can be a rocky one.
Photo Credit: Anna Shvets
by Marti Maltby, Director Peace House Community – A Place to Belong
This article originally appeared in “The Alley,” the newspaper for the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.