I hate hospitals. Doesn’t everyone, really? But as hospitals go, this is a pretty nice one. I’ve been here before – twice as a patient myself and several times for my husband. This time I’m here for my mom. She is having hip replacement surgery. We had to check in at 5:45 am, so I spent last night at her house. Sleeping on her hideabed.
Well, sort of sleeping. I turned the light off around 10:45 and got maybe 3 hours of sleep before proceeding to wake up every 45 minutes. No truly good sleep is had before a 4:30 alarm. We were at the hospital at 5:30. They have a pretty sophisticated system here. After checking in, I was handed a pager and told that when it went off, I could meet my mom in pre-op. They also gave me her patient number so I could check her status on a board in the waiting room.
There were 3 other people waiting when I sat down, two older men reading and one younger woman sleeping. One by one they received pages and left the area. By the time I received my page it was nearly 7:00. They wheeled her in to surgery at 7:45.
So now I’m camped out at a table in the lobby, eating breakfast and sucking down coffee as if my life depended on it. I’ve already generated an impressive pile of trash. If all goes according to plan, the surgery should be done in 2 1/2 hours. Meanwhile, the hospital has excellent free wifi and I have the entire internet at my fingers.