Night 18

Tonight will be the eighteenth straight night Nathan has been in the hospital and that I have slept here with him. This stay will easily exceed his previous longest hospital stay which was twenty-one days (or maybe twenty-two) days. His previous longest stay was for stem cell transplant. He went in on day -8 and I think got out on day +13. We are looking at another two to three weeks in here. Nathan has handled it well, but is pretty sad, homesick, and tired of the hospital.

We are on room number three tonight. His first room was an isolation room. At first I thought isolation sucked because he couldn't leave the room. It turns out that with the tiny in-patient playroom, he really doesn't want to leave anyway and isolation was a pretty good way to ensure a single room. We hung on to the single for awhile and he was bumped to a shared room. It was a pretty good room. We had I think three nights with a teenager. The first night was terrible for sleep. The kid was drugged up on pain medicine and he was one of those talkative "drunks". He was up all night and loud. After that night it was okay. Then we got two nights of the big double room to ourselves and that was great. Today we got bumped to the worst room (there are three of them actually) on the floor. It is a double, but they shouldn't be allowed to put two beds in here. The room is small and configured so the beds are at a T. One of the beds (Nathan's) doesn't face the TV. The TV is beside the bed and awkward to look at. I can't walk around the bed to leave the room without pushing aside the curtains to the part of the room for the other bed. It is really a terrible room and it shouldn't be considered for shared use. They said they had to move Nathan to put two girls together, but that logic isn't so sound. They could have moved his current roommate to him and put the two girls in the shitty room. Of all the things to waste emotional energy over, the room isn't worth too much, but it does make me a bit angry. Nathan is looking at a stay here of over a month. That is a long time and the kids that will be here a long time they should take extra effort to make sure can be as comfortable as possible. I'm not sure this move would have happened had the NP that is usually on the floor not been off today. She seems to look after Nate. He will be moved on Monday or Tuesday to an isolation room for his Tuesday treatment. He will be radioactive enough not to be allowed to share a room. I don't think I will sleep much tonight. I hope Nathan sleeps through it all. His roommate just turned three and hasn't adjusted well to the hospital. He hasn't been sleeping well and just woke up at 10:30 pm from a long, hard nap. He is now happily playing with his Grandpa. You can't expect too much out of a boy that just turned three in terms of moderating volume.

Hospital sleep sucks.

Random thoughts: Why do they bother printing hospital names on linens? And, have you ever slept on hospital linens that had the name of the hospital you were staying at printed on them? Perhaps this is a big city hospital issue. I'm not sure if I recall this back at home. My two sheets have different hospital names printed on them. My pillowcases have a third hospital's name. None of them are the name of the hospital that I am in.