Strange Goings On In Health Care

When I was younger, I got Pleuritis or lung sack inflammation one Christmas. It hurt so bad I had to be admitted to hospital.

I remember how they were hymn singing on TV and I sat in my hospital bed, because it hurt lying down, and I watched through the curtain less window as large white snowflakes drifted through the black onto the hospital courtyard far below. I felt very lonely and tired and missed my family. The room was small, with two beds with a screen between them, mine being nearest the door and the other near the window, but the other bed was empty. At last I managed to fall asleep fitfully, but I kept waking because of the pain, and sometime during the night I discovered they had admitted another patient.

I lay in the half dark lit by the snowfall and the little lights on all the panels in the room, and I looked at the screen and listened to my roommate. They were rustling the sheets and breathing, evidently sleeping badly too. As the screen was backlit by the light from the window, I tried to make out their silhouette but I couldn't. I thought that I'd say hello in the morning, and at last I managed to fall asleep.

As you can guess by where I'm posting this, I peeped behind the screen as I got up early in the morning, but the bed was empty and made. I asked a nurse if my roommate had left already, I thought it strange that they'd gone out even earlier. She said there had been no other patient in my room.

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As this didn't reach the minimum word count, here's some other hospital related mildly odd events:

I've since worked as an assistant nurse in old people's homes, mainly dementia wards. It's hard but rewarding work.

One thing I've noticed is that in three separate places I've worked, regardless of the age of the building or the alarm system used, it's been common for the alarms to go off in empty rooms, and due to the nature of the care, rooms are empty because an occupant has recently died and another hasn't had time to move in yet. In once place during the beginning of the covid pandemic, with ever more empty rooms and death in the air, the alarms were going off in the wrong rooms constantly.

There was this time a few years ago when a man had just died. He'd not been the easiest patient and some had even refused to go in to him because he was violent and howled truly horrible things at them. I was working night and the funerary service would come pick him up in the morning. As usual we lock the door to an unoccupied room (well by someone living) so no other patient would wander in. Then the alarm went off in his room.

I can tell you it wasn't fun to creep down that corridor and fumble with the keys. I snaked my arm in to turn off the alarm without entering the room, but then was so uneasy I had to turn the lights on low to make sure he wasn't, what? Wrongly declared dead and standing by the door ready to pounce, as he could do when alive? The corpse had moved? I wasn't sure what I expected but everything was the same. Silly as it sounds, I said good night to him after I'd turned the alarm off because there was such a feeling of pressure or how to say in the room, that right then I felt certain he was there. I figured that even if I couldn't help him with whatever he wanted, I could at least be polite.

The funerary service guy came by early in the morning, and I helped him dress the man. It's not as scary as it sounds, just a part of the job. By then there was no strange feeling in the room any more.