The Perils of Recuperating in a Teaching Hospital

When I was first admitted to the hospital, I was told that this was a teaching hospital, and was I OK with that? I was, I said; I envisioned doctors being trailed by the occasional student, who would be asked technical questions about my case as an exercise, just as I'd seen on ER. That was the case, in fact; several very competent young doctors-in-training came in and offered their best guesses at some diagnoses and other issues, and invariably the doctor agreed with them. So the med students are off the hook. On the other hand, it didn't occur to me that I would be victimized by nursing students.

Apparently, nursing students are free to torment helpless patients without the direct supervision of a trained, licensed doctor. During the course of my stay, I encountered at least three student nurses. One of these was completely competent and gets nothing but praise from me. The other two, well...

My first sour encounter with a nursing student occurred at about 4:15 AM. Nurses, as a courtesy, will knock and wait momentarily before entering, but if they have a task to complete and you are just one of several patients they need to see before their shift is complete, then your sleep schedule be damned - they'll wake you up. So at 4:15 AM, I am doing my best to awaken. I am bleary eyed, slumped awkwardly in my cot, my throat aches because the stomach pump tube has resettled during the night, my mouth is dry and all of my ice cubes from last night have melted, the IV machine is beeped inanely, and I am trying to sit up and orient myself so you, the nurse, can check my blood pressure, oxygenation levels, and my temperature.

At 4:15, a new face entered. A young fellow. I struggle to be pleasant and mumble good morning - it sounds more like, "Grmf magging" - and start working on sitting up in bed. The nurse - we'll call him Mario - smiles, says hi, and walks over to my left. So far so good, but I do notice the "Montgomery College" patch on the left sleeve of his shirt. Are you a student, I ask. He replies yes, and I notice a bad sign - he's nervous. At least he's not drawing blood, I think. We chat a little as he struggles to wheel in his diagnostic machine. He nearly sends my laptop flying to the floor, but I manage to twist and save it, a phenomenal achievement for the time of morning and how long I've been awake. I start to think this is the first time he's done this.

Now, there is a pretty fluid ritual for getting these routine diagnostics done. I sit up, I roll up my sleeve, you apply pressure cuff and then oxygenation clip to one of my outstretched fingers. Then we deal with the thermometer. This should have been the procedure, but instead, the new nurse decides to add a new step in and adjusts my bed.

Now, I've described how I learned to operate IV machines and suction devices. Those were easy. The bed that I'm on is something else. It has no less than four control panels and two remote controls, each with some degree of overlapping features. There are no words on the bed, only a series of vague pictograms depicting the associated action produced by pushing a particular unmarked button. These buttons can raise or lower my bed, or tilt it, or raise or lower specific parts of the bed. The bed can lifted all the way to the ceiling!

Because my high-tech hospital bed is so fiendishly complicated, I don't want anyone to touch it but me unless they have a very good reason to. Unfortunately, my nurse - who is short - decides to press a button and raise my bed. I go shooting up a foot into the air, and he begins his process. Fine, I think. At least he didn't change any angles. We conclude the vitals-taking - it's 4:25 now - and he decides to try to put the bed back down again. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to.

The nurse does the worst possible thing in a technological crisis, which is to press all of the buttons in hopes that one of the buttons will produce the desired result while undoing the effects of pressing all of the other wrong buttons. What the nurse managed to do was elevate my feet a good foot and a half about my head. Picture me, as I have described myself. Take into account the fact that I have an upset stomach, and a stomach pump which is ostensibly pumping things upwards. Blood and gastric juices are now sloshing their way towards my head, and I am gurgling furiously at the nurse to put me right back down this instant and go find the head nurse and tell her I want my pain medication stat! The nursing student does exactly what any freaked-out student in his position would do - he flees. "I will tell the nurse!", he chirps frantically, and bolts from the room.

Time passes. In about two minutes, I start hollering and hammering the Page Nurse button on the side of the bed. I can feel my head turning red with pressure, and my stomach losing its struggle with gravity. Finally, a real, certified nurse shows up, squawks in horror, and starts attempting to decipher the cryptic runes on the side of the bed. Apparently, no one has been in this position before.

With mere moments to spare, we figure out the mystery of the mechanical bed: Although there is an 'elevate feet' button, there is no button to produce the opposite effect. Instead, the solution is to raise the bed all the way to the ceiling, where it will gradually flatten itself, bringing head and feet level. Then one can press the 'lower all' button, and gradually bring the bed down to the floor.

A few minutes later, I had my pain medication injection, my stomach settled and I went back to sleep, only to be interrupted two hours later by another nurse interested in my vital signs.

Coda: I never saw Mario again. I hope he hasn't trapped anyone else in an upside-down arrangement. Two nights later, a second nursing student came in and did the exact same thing. Fortunately, I knew how to fix the problem, so the student left a little wiser after the experience.