Private Hospital Rooms

The kids and I recently began reading Farewell to Manzanar, a book about the relocation of Japanese-Americans during WWII. The Wakatasuki family managed to keep the family together on the buses headed out to the concentration camps, and also managed to snag a unit of one of the barracks for their family. However, the family was too big to all fit in one unit, so one of the married daughters and her husband ended up with strangers (as did nearly everyone else in the concentration camp). On Thursday, we were reading about the difficulty of that lack of privacy for them and how desperate the couple was to find something –anything-- that would get them out of the situation of living with strangers.

Friday I drove down to my hometown to sit with Dad in the hospital while Mom went to a funeral and the sibs were at work. For the first three days of his recuperation from surgery, Dad hadn’t exactly been being a very patient patient. (Incidentally, things were MUCH improved by the time I arrived.)

During the day I began to realize how very nice it is to have a private room in the hospital. When Maggie has been hospitalized she always had a private room except for the first ICU (in Madison) where there was a huge amount of space between beds due to all the ICU equipment. When I was in the hospital having babies, I didn’t have roommates. (One time, the whole maternity ward had been closed for over a week, and they had to open it up and call in staff for me and baby Paul.) When my friend Steve was in the hospital, there was never a roommate with him when I visited.

To share a room (especially a small room) with a stranger, that makes the whole experience a little different. There are two tv’s running. There are two sets of conversations. You know that whatever the therapist says to you is heard by the other patient and his family. You know that the conversations with visitors are being overheard. The amount of noise or amount of light in the room is something to take into account for the other person. If you want to pray or sing, you wonder how that’s going to affect the other patient. If the other patient has a potty mouth, that’s affecting you.

I know that hospitals used to have wards, and I used to think that semi-private rooms were an unnecessary luxury. But in my old age now, getting cranky and used to my privacy, I’m really glad that next month in Milwaukee I know we’ll have the luxury of a private room for Mags. Boy, I am spoiled rotten.