Quiet, please – after all, this is a hospital
Some intravenous supplies and other equipment at Long Island hospitals were moved into hallways but still connected to the patient during the pandemic. This reader would have appreciated such less obtrusive sounds at the hospital where he was taken. Credit: Stony Brook Medicine
I wasn’t worried about my high cholesterol. Living in Greenlawn, I had been doing a lot of bike riding on Long Island’s hilly North Shore. The Cow Harbor race in Northport was an annual September event for me, and I had completed a couple of mini-triathlons in Oyster Bay.
My heart was in great shape for someone in his sixties– or so I thought. Then, one day in 1994, while jogging, I began to feel chest pains and wound up in a highly regarded Long Island hospital specializing in heart surgery. And surgery is what I got -- a quadruple coronary artery bypass. Luckily, my heart wasn’t damaged and after a couple of months, I resumed my normal life, including biking and jogging.
I did that for 20 years. There was nothing wrong with me -- or so I thought. I was wrong. One day, while biking on a hilly Vermont back road, I felt chest pains again. I eventually learned that two more arteries had closed up. I didn’t want a local hospital, so my wife, Barbara, drove me the 300 miles back to the emergency room at that same hospital where I got patched up two decades earlier.
There, I met fellow patient Vinnie, a 50-something, heavyset character with a Brooklyn accent right out of “The Sopranos.” Vinnie’s story included a history of strokes and heart attacks, and he had become insulin dependent. Along with these maladies, he was also endowed with a violent temper.
Vinnie spoke about attacking his nephew with a baseball bat (but said he still loves him), being arrested by the police and taken away in handcuffs and leg irons. This led to another heart attack and his chance visit with me. He also spoke of an abusive childhood and the need to talk to a psychiatrist. I would agree.
Then there was the nurse -- a skinny blonde in her twenties with horrible-looking tattoos. When entering information into her computer, she noted the intravenous drip as being in my left arm. I corrected her, pointing out it was the right arm. She responded that she sometimes gets left and right mixed up. Wow. I hope she never works in the pre-op amputation ward.
The hospital was top-notch, but it is a hospital, and as such it is a place to stay away from if possible. From the moment I checked into the emergency room until I left, my brain was bombarded incessantly with a cacophony of beeps. Each piece of equipment seemed to be in competition to provide the most irritating bleeps, beeps, chimes, bells, dings and buzzes.
Heart monitors beep every second -- morning, noon and night. The IV machine bleeps when the battery is low or when the flow is not correct. The blood pressure machine dings when pressure is too high or too low. Nurses have phones that constantly beep, and even the fire alarm went off. The sounds can be continuous, syncopated or sent out like incoherent Morse code. It is maddening. The CIA might consider this a substitute for waterboarding.
I entered the hospital with chest pains, though, and left pain-free. And the only thing done was to place two little half-inch tubes called stents into my clogged cardiac arteries. Now, if we only had a way to quiet those amazing machines that help us leave these facilities healthy after entering sick.
Reader Bill Domjan lives in Melville
