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The remaining days and nights of my hospital stay prior to discharge were filled with restlessness, discomfort, loneliness, apprehension, fatigue and depression. Various members of the “medical team” dropped by intermittently to examine me, but most of the time I was left to contemplate my condition and cope with my pain. 
 

I found that unless I asserted myself, little attention was devoted to alleviating my pain.  For example, from the moment the endotracheal tube was removed the morning after the surgery, my throat was sore - - - very sore.  They had given me ice chips to suck on soon thereafter, but nothing further.  The soreness persisted over the next days.  It was not until the fourth day, when I was complaining about the situation to a nurse I had not seen before, that she offered to bring me some lozenges to suck on.  Lozenges?  “You mean you have throat lozenges to alleviate the pain?”.
 
 ”Nobody offered them to you before?”
 

“Well, no.”
 

Sure enough, the lozenges were numbing and soothing.  Why hadn’t anybody brought them before?  After all, every surgical patient who has had general anaesthesia has had an endotracheal tube shoved down his/her throat.  The throat and windpipe react to the intrusion and irritable soreness inevitably results.  Why not provide lozenges as a matter of course?
 

Nevertheless, it is this sort of general indifference which undermines the hospital experience.
 

Lozenges, of course, are just a small indication of this indifference.  Another one of my pet peeves is the fact that once that aide in the CCU had gently cleansed me the day after surgery, no one else ever washed me; no one ever offered to wash me.  As I have described in a prior chapter, lying in a hospital bed can be a perspiring experience.  My ability to get on and off the bed was somewhat limited, and painful.  The first couple of days I was using a bed pan, and I didn’t have enough solid food in me to require use of the toilet.  But, surely, I needed to be washed down, if not for my cleanliness, at least for my dignity.  I always thought that patients in my condition received “sponge baths” in or at their beds.  But there were no sponge baths to be had.  I guess they’re no longer part of the union contract!!
 

Fortunately, my domestic partner came to visit me every day and she washed me down using  wash cloths that she commandeered from a nearby corridor supply closet. (This is but one very small example of what I was talking about in the Preface when I said that  I could not imagine the hardship one would undergo to face this ordeal alone.)
 

Also, by the fourth day, I was able to struggle off the bed by myself, shuffle over to the bathroom a few feet away (when it was available, there being, of course, two other room occupants to share it with, and more when there were visitors), and attempt to wipe myself down with the wet corner of a towel.
 

I understand that there is a nationwide nursing shortage.  I also know that my experience in one hospital cannot serve as the basis of a generalization.  However, I have now taken the time to speak  to other people who have been hospitalized in the New York metropolitan area, and their comments have been similar to mine. Comments to the contrary have been the exception rather than the rule.  And, after all, The Motel Monte is not some backwoods infirmary; it is a major player on the metropolitan New York medical scene.  And it doesn’t require the services of a registered nurse to sponge bathe a post-surgical patient.  Something is wrong, terribly wrong, and I suspect that not enough is being done to address the matter.
 

In a similar vein, I discovered that no one was particularly concerned about the pain I was experiencing.  Unless I persisted in my requests for pain medication, I received no attention or sympathy in that regard.  Now, don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m some pampered wimp, incapable of tolerating a little pain and, therefore, was whining for relief every five minutes.  Quite the contrary.  As one example of my pain toleration, a few years ago I had a lower rear wisdom tooth prepped for the installation of a crown . . . without any anaesthetic.  However, that pain lasted for an hour and then subsided.  This pain would last, unabated, for several days.
 

Since the surgery, I have read about hospital-based programs in pain management in which patients are given limited control over the introduction of pain medication into their bodies.  Whatever the status of those programs, and the medical philosophies that buttressed them, was in April 2000,  in my experience The Motel Monte was not implementing them.  Certainly this is an area of care that requires more consideration, and every prospective surgical patient should make inquiry regarding the status of pain management in the hospital of his/her choice.
 

When I first organized an outline for this book, I considered naming two of the chapters  “You Have Throat Lozenges?” and  “May I Have My Pain Medication Before I Die?”  This was reflective of the anger I felt during the recuperative period whenever I contemplated the hospital experience.  Ultimately, as you can see, these individual ideas became melded into a more generalized statement of dissatisfaction.

To be continued….