Hacker News Reader

Comment by swayvil | Hacker News Reader

My friend spent the night in the hospital recently, for observation.

She didn't sleep a wink. With all the beeping and alarms and periodic checks and procedures. Mostly involving her roommate.

The next morning she was mentally and physically wrecked. the first thing she told the nurse was, "I want to go home so I can get some sleep.

The nurse laughs and replies, "I hear that all the time. Nobody ever sleeps here".

Now that's messed up. Sleep is the great healer. No sleep is the great destroyer. Is this intentional or institutional insanity or what?

I mean why don't they just put strychnine in the water supply while they're at it?

View on HN

I was in the hospital for about two weeks at the beginning of 2022. It was awful. The nurse would come in for evening meds and checks around 10-11 PM. When I was lucky enough to have neighbors who weren't trying to die all night it was usually relatively quiet from midnight to 4 AM. Then things would start to pick up. Phlebotomists making rounds to draw blood before 5 AM. Morning meds between 5-6 AM. Nursing shift change at 7 AM. Doctors doing rounds mid morning. Breakfast mixed in there somewhere. Of course I couldn't actually _do_ anything all day except try to read or play around on my phone, so I spent a lot of time dozing.

I wasn't so lucky for the first week of my stay. I was on IV meds that pushed my BP up significantly, to the point where every time the automatic hourly BP reading was taken it would set off alarms. During the day the charge nurse would usually silence the alarm (from the nursing station) immediately but at night they were understaffed (this was during a covid wave) and the nursing station often wasn't manned. So sometimes the alarm would sound for 20+ minutes. Every hour... all night... Eventually I found a sympathetic nurse who actually knew how to adjust the settings on the machine and disabled the alarm entirely.

At least I didn't have to share a room. That would have been misery.

An overnight stay is for observation not comfort. The hospital wants to gather as many metrics as possible to keep you alive, respond ASAP to issues and dis-chargable to free up room for other sick patients. not give you a hotel bed.

Go to the hospital healthy, come out sick.

I don't have a medical degree or anything but that's crazy.

(Also, the nurse said nobody sleeps here. Not just the people under observation.)

> Go to the hospital healthy, come out sick.

This isn't whats happening. Being sleep deprived for a day is annoying, but hardly a health issue. I bet most people would rather have doctors respond to you suddenly dropping blood O2 levels to under 90% than not.

> (Also, the nurse said nobody sleeps here. Not just the people under observation.)

Yes, nobody sleeps because nurses and doctors are all working >14 hour shifts with on-call rotations trying to keep people ALIVE. I have many medical professionals in my family, all of them are rest deprived, trying to keep track of the myriad of patients all demanding personal constant attention.

Actually, sleep deprivation, even for one night, is definitely a health issue. And the only reason it's accepted is because it's so common. It's the modern equivalent of drinking out of lead cups.

(And of course a sleep-deprived medical professional is a health hazard to everybody involved. Only a fool thinks otherwise.)

Then leave. They're not forcing you to stay. Generally no one puts you on observation unless you need it, and by "need it", it means "needs to be disturbed to take tests"

If you think sleep is a higher health factor than the reasons that the hospital want to put you under observation, then just refuse treatment.

If you don't want to be disturbed by patients in the same room, you can pay for that.

Sleep deprivation is not as dangerous as dying from an acute condition. If you're in the hospital for one night, you're being treated by doctors who want to make sure you're not going to die for the night. If you get admitted for a longer period, it's a different environment altogether. At least this has been my experience.

You get used to the beeping after one night anyway. If not, you can ask the nurse for earplugs or even sleeping pills (although sleeping pills are harder to get).

> I have many medical professionals in my family, all of them are rest deprived, trying to keep track of the myriad of patients all demanding personal constant attention.

That is not exactly defense of medical system. If it keeps workers sleep deprived they will make mistakes. This just means system itself sux.

Why are you staying overnight in a hospital if you're healthy? The few times I've stayed overnight in a hospital, it was for surgical recovery and I definitely slept. I was on so many painkillers, I barely remember the experience. My wife did a four-day stint in the ICU when her liver failed years back, and from what I remember, she was barely conscious the first few days. I don't know if I'd call either of those experiences comfortable, but she's alive and I now have a working spine, and neither of those would have been true otherwise. So thanks hospitals.

Ricky Gervais had a line that stuck with me back on the podcast with Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington - `How do people sleep in hospital? They'll wake you up to give a sleeping pill`

The beeping and alarms and periodic checks and procedures are there to prevent worse things than a night's worth of lost sleep.

Yeah I get the obvious theory. But it's like putting a tourniquet around your neck to stop a nosebleed.

No its not. One bad night of sleep won't kill you. You are more than welcome to reject an overnight stay.

Likewise, l hospitals serve food portioned nutritionally for a healthy adult when people who are sick or healing from injury may very well need more calories and protein to fuel their bodies healing.

The last time I was in the hospital (2022) the portions weren't terrible, the main problem was that the food was so damned bland. The first few days it doesn't seem like it's that bad, but by the time you've been eating it a week you just lose your appetite because the food is so unappealing. Not to mention that if you have a test or procedure at the wrong time and miss placing your order (IIRC they stopped taking orders at like 4 PM) you're going to get whatever the cafeteria feels like sending you and it will have been sitting at the nurses station for hours. Yummy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com