Living in the Hospital

I've been at the hospital since Saturday morning, and it strikes me that "living" in the hospital is kind of like living on a military base (of course, I've never lived on a military base, so I might be totally wrong here).

What I mean is that everything is extremely structured. Of course, since I can't eat or drink anything, my structure is probably less than what other patients are experiencing, but it's kind of neat to observe. The food cart comes at the same time (within five minutes ... it's really kind of amazing) every day. The nurses go on and off shift. The LNAs come and check vitals. If you need something, you press a button and somebody comes. It's very strange.

Everyone has been extremely nice to me here, actually, to the degree where I have to comment on it. I ended up going to a different hospital than usual because it's smaller and their ER isn't ridiculously crowded all the time. Everyone keeps saying to me, "Why aren't you at the hospital in your hometown?", but I think it's kind of a blessing in disguise that I ended up here. I get very grumpy a) when I haven't had caffeine for over two days, b) when I haven't had anything to eat or drink in over two days, c) when I'm not at home, d) when I don't know what's going on, e) when I'm in a significant amount of pain, and e) when I'm away from my family. Put it all together, and you can imagine that I'm not exactly the ideal patient. Yet everyone continues to be nice. Yeah, I know it's their job, but I've been to a lot of hospitals and it's not always the case.

So I'm having a CAT scan at some point today, and then hopefully I can have some water ... I feel like I'm living in a desert.