Various beeps in the background

Until now, arriving at Wren's bedside when he is still trying to sleep, I haven't had time to write about all those other aspects of hospital life which create the unforgettable atmosphere. Here are a few glimpses:

• Beeps. Anyone who has tried to get a kid to sleep in hospital knows about the beeps. They drive us crazy. During the critical care and recovery time you tolerate them because its reassuring to know someone knows, and could be responding to every vacillation in your child's vital signs. By the time you hit the floor you are starting to invent technology to implant the beeper in the specific nurse and have total silence. Could we have them wirelessly phoning the nurse's headset instead of alarming? I suspect that nurses are so inured to beeps that they could sleep right through them while the rest of us writhe and turn, jumping within a second to silence them. Of course, we have all learned how to silence alarms but only for 3 minutes without turning the monitor onto standby (which I do too at times when we go to telemetry). What we are supposed to do is diagnose and remedy any beep Wren has on the floor. This means retaping his toe pulsox and resticking his respiration monitors (3 wires he tosses off in bed)... without waking him. Is it worth it? Not tonight.


• Helicopters: Day and night, every few hours you hear helicopters. You don't hear them in 3W but whenever I went outside, even to the cafeteria courtyard, I have a good chance of a helicopter. The air ambulance lands on the left roof of LPCH and sometimes hovers overhead a while before swerving off away from us. In the CVICU you often get ambulance nurses [good god, I can't even remember the word for them I am so tired and brain dead - oh! Paramedics... not dead yet!] leaving with their stretcher/trolley thing piled high with bags. They must bring the patients in some way that is secret and fast but leave along with the rest of us.


• Construction: All day, you are surrounded by workmen. They carry their coolers at lunchtime, rolls of cable at 9pm, carts of tools and tape all day. As I was wheeling Wren about the floor yesterday he kept asking "what that noise?" as the roof was shuddering. I told him it was "drilling" and "tools" and he asked for "more drilling?" It was "too loud" I told him. To give the construction crew credit, they are the neatest, tidiest, most considerate workers I have ever seen. Well, you don't see them work because all work areas (however small) are encapsulated in tents before the tools are used. So all around the hospital you see these little white tents from which noises, and occasionally heads, emerge. I was told that once, when they didn't use the right tent, the roof flooded and part of the top floor. This may be a rumor. The worker who told me looked wry and amused.


• Wooshing: I don't know if its the air-conditioning, a ventilator, a noisy computer or just the oxygen mask which streams air above Wren's bed, but hospital rooms always have the hum of machines. Its a background wooshing like a white noise machine set a few notches too high.


• Hand sanitiser: Its everywhere. I know we are supposed to use soap as the first line of defence but apparently everyone has already fallen back to the secondary position. Nurses, families, kids in the playroom all get a perfunctory squirt of a goopy white stuff that smells of alcohol. It doesn't seem to be messing with my skin as much as the soap wash in the Seattle CVICU but perhaps that means it isn't working. On the plane I read Mother Jones which had an 'expose' on the soap industry. I think it mentioned the irony of our germ phobia while Australian doctors are combating the rise in asthma by feeding children dirt-tablets as medicine to build immunity. I just want to say now, we are not usually this clean. We will not be this clean again. Just give me a few months to recover, to regain my normal wallow.


• UV and Gloom: The lighting levels are strange in hospitals. The halls are that tepid level of institutional UV which is neither bright and cheerful nor gloomy. Enter a room and its a different story. The rooms are kept shaded most of the time - like little caves. However, each bed has a few light settings and none of them are mood lighting. They are just too local to feel BRIGHT unless you want BRILLIANCE (as if you are illuminated for surgery or a procedure or were growing dope in a cellar). None of it feels normal.

So far today
Discharge plans continue. Labs were done 4.45am. I think he is almost up for the day but now its Chest X-ray time.