They enjoyed the usual hospital night-time visits of the delirious elderly gentleman trying to climb into their beds, and nurses, who for some reason were missing in action during the day but always there at 2am and 6am for blood pressure checks.
NOTY told her day nurse that she refused to have those night-time obs any more, and same for the old girl waiting on the nursing home bed, who enjoyed her first good sleep in two months. She had never even had blood pressure problems, she thankfully told NOTY.
I asked for a pressure mattress to be fitted due to my sister’s poor mobility; the first two didn’t work. There was one bathroom in the ward, with no latch.
NOTY needs help showering at home (hint: Parkinson’s) but, when preparing for a CT scan, she was left to shower herself, with drip trolley attached. This probably dislodged her IV canula and painful contrast media leaked into the tissues of her forearm and over her clothes.
NOTY was parked in a radiology corridor, seated in a hard wheelchair, while she waited, shivering and dehumanised, for three hours until an intern arrived to re-site the canula. Back at the ward, I asked for an ice-pack. They didn’t have any. I made one every 20 minutes from the ice machine.
Original source: au