As the story goes,
I broke my neck. Personally, I like to think of it as simply
fracturing a vertebrae. But
whatever your fancy, the situation remains the same. I ended up in the
hospital having three hours or so of surgery done. Two week stay in the hospital for three hours of surgery.
Nice.
Anyway, this really belongs in connection with the Bad Roommate Node. And this is a third person view. I mean, the guy in the hospital bed beside me in my room wasn't a bad roommate for me, but man was he hell for the poor nurses.
Unless you satisfy one of the following conditions:
you have no idea what
nurses go through.
My roommate was 86 years old. But he was Houdini (or his reincarnate) without question. They guy had had some sort of surgery on his brain or something 'cause there were stitches on the top of his head. But he still need additional surgery as there was still some fluid or something in there that shouldn't have been.
Anyway, he seemed pretty normal for the first day or so until one morning he asked me if that was my dog in the bathroom. I was in shock, I said "What dog?" to which he replied, "that one" pointing again to the bathroom and whistling for the dog to come over.
Okay, so he was a little out of it. No big deal. Except that the guy refused to keep any tubes in him whatsoever. His IV? He pulled it out. His catheter? Pulled it out. So when the nurses tied him to the bed, he didn't take kindly to it, and out came the threats. And once the nurses had left the room he would start into his routine of escaping their tie up. And no matter what they did, he seemed to be able to escape, from situations that I'm sure there's no way I could have got out of. I'm talking the knots were behind and underneath him, or underneath the bed or whatever. It didn't matter. Within 15 minutes he seemed to be up and walking around no matter what the poor nurses did. One night he stayed up the entire night, constantly escaping, and keeping me up as he did it too. So the nurses tied him to a lazyboy-like chair and took him out to the ward's front desk for the night.
I said to my nurse the next day that the night's incident would have been the towel throw-in incident for me. Nurses have so much patience it's not even funny. I mean, I was no trouble for them at all; I could walk and eat and do pretty much everything on my own and did exactly as I was told. Not this guy though, he was a bad roommate.