Passive Aggressive

My second night in the hospital brought me a new roommate. My first roommate had been discharged after what I believe was something similar to the operation I'm about to have. He had broken both legs in a forty-foot rock climbing fall. My next roommate had just barely survived a multiple rollover car accident in which he was the drunk driver (I heard him admit as much to a nurse). He was in the ortho ward following a surgery that placed twenty-three pins in his left arm. The guy was bruised and bloodied and must have been in enormous pain. I later heard his wife describe having been told only a couple of days previously, first, that he was unlikely to walk out of the hospital, and then, that he was likely to be on a respirator for weeks, not days. By the time I was leaving, it sounded like he would be out the following day. He seemed to handle his situation admirably.

The man snored. And that first night we shared a room, he was particularly swollen and prone to snoring. I actually heard him tell the nurse as he was being delivered into the room that he feared his snoring would keep me awake. She told him not to worry that I was already asleep. A strange comment given that I had recently discussed with another nurse the ineffectiveness of the pain meds I had been receiving.

As soon as he was asleep, he began to snore. He rumbled with every exchange of air. The only time it stopped was when he would wake up. He was facing serious pain and concerned nurses, so that happened relatively frequently. He had no trouble dozing back off though. And the guy was loud. So loud. I've heard talk of people who snored excessively loudly, but had never actually been present to hear much more than repetitive snorting and the mildest of percusive sleep apnea.

I was having trouble sleeping for other reasons too. Primarily, my problem was pain. 48 hours or however long into this process I was, and I was regularly rating my pain at a ten and otherwise at a nine (on a scale of 1 to 10 with ten being the worst pain you've ever felt). That was also a busy night for the helicopters. The landing pad was the floor above me just diagonal from my room. I saw and heard every landing and takeoff of the flight for life choppers. The view was great but that night the frequency was disturbing.

My nurses seemed unwilling to do anything about my ability to control my pain or to sleep. I couldn't control the helicopters; I had limited ability to think the pain away; I cruelly decided that I could stop the snoring by waking the patient. I was hooked up to an oxygen saturation monitor which is just a little clip that goes onto the end of your finger like they have on an exercise bike. If your saturation gets to low, an alarm sounds loudly. I began removing the clip from my finger for short periods. The saturation would drop, the alarm would sound, the snoring would stop, and I'd put my finger back in to quiet the machine.

I must have woken up my roommate a dozen times over an hour or two. None of the nurses or aids ever reponded to my loud alarm. Eventually, his IV alarm, which sounds nearly identical, sounded and a nurse actually responded to his side of the room. I gave up my dirty tricks feeling rather bad about having been such a dick. It would be another three days before I slept for longer than roughly ninety minutes or two hours at a stretch.

Jonathan 8/14/2006 04:00:00 PM