You don’t go to a hospital to get any sleep. You are there to get treatments or monitoring that you normally can’t get as an out patient.
You are right. You don’;t get any rest in the hospital, and it isn’t the noise so much as the Nurse coming to check BP, change IV bottles, and ding her’his other duties.
Can’t be helped.
When I was in the hospital for four back surgeries, I was so ripped, I didn’t know what day it was. What really pissed me off was that the remote changed channels one way. If you miss your channel you have to go through 150 channels to get back there. Combine that with morphine and you have an unhappy camper.
Most X-rays are done with portable machines in the unit so that's additional noise. All patients are on IV's and hooked to heart and vital sign moniters. There is almost always an IV beeping because it's empty or the patient bent their arm which stopped the med from running or something else wrong. The moniters beep if the blood pressure is too high or low, the oxygen saturation drops, the heartbeat gets tachy or too low or something more serious.
The beds are made with bed alarms that are set to go off when a patient gets too close to getting out of bed. Many patients are high fall risks and the alarm will alert us before the patient is out and up on their feet. There's another alarm to wake everyone up.
Intubated patient needs a cat scan or MRI, we transport him or her down ourselves to get it. Need respiratory therapist with us and that can get a little noisy and distracting for other patients as we push the heavy bed and equipment by them. Double the chaos when we have one of those huge specialty beds for the (ahem) larger patients.
The phones ring constantly. The xerox/fax machine is not very quiet. And then somebody from a med supply company comes by to have an inservice right outside the rooms for the latest fecal collection bag or something. They have to have most of those for the staff in the unit because the nurses cannot afford to be away from their patients, nor do they want to.
Then there's the families and friends who want to visit their loved ones. They aren't, for the most part, noisy or disruptive. However, as God as my witness, I've watched as a group of them will surround Grandpa's bed and get down in his face, poke him to tell him over and over for a solid half hour or more that they want him to get better and he needs his rest and try to sleep. If his eye blinks they rush up to the bed again, start poking him and asking him what he needs (meanwhile Grandpa has an intubation tube down his throat and can't talk) and this lasts another half hour. Then they will get back to their chairs and yak about life. Sometimes there will be 4-5 or more visitors at a time and we no longer can force a limit of 2 at a time.
We get alot of patients in isolation and when the nurses are in their rooms all gowned and gloved up, they yell out to the tech (me) when they need supplies. My ears hurt when I get someone screeching "I need this. I need that." Can only imagine how the patient feels.
After 8 or 12 hours of this extra sensory stimulation, when I get home, I want to be alone. I sympathize with those who are sick and can't get away from all of this.
But with all the advances in medicine and cures and cares, how can this be avoided? I don't have an answer. Many hospitals have been working hard on avoiding mistakes, reducing hospital acquired infections and fixing things that cause more harm to patients. This may be the next thing that they address.
BS. My infant daughter in the NICU was almost killed by the noise - because she could not sleep.