Your Local Hospital...

Hospitals are truly a wonderful place. They purport to be about health and wellness. I'm sure that's a part, but perhaps not in the way they expect. Hospitals are a great place to be miserable, both physically and emotionally, while you spend vast sums of money and simultaneously realize that the human body is quite disgusting.

I just spent four solid days, and parts of two others, in the hospital with a rather nasty case of cellulitis. This nasty little bug had me essentially bedridden since late Friday. The hospital stay was unpleasant. Let's enumerate:

1. On the first day, every few hours, some well-meaning nurse would trot in, introduce herself, and ask me the same twenty questions the previous nurse had.
2. Next, that same nurse would invariably jab me with something pointy and either insert or draw out fluids, and tell me it's for my own good. My upper body is a road map of nasty bruises, now.
3. Visiting Hours. It's like I'm eight years old again with my mother telling me my friends have to go home.
4. After three days, I was apparently well enough to be removed from my private room and placed with other sick people. My room mate? A large hairy man who looked like he might once have been a circus strongman. He was every bit as noisy as his appearance would suggest.

After this, my primary motivation in getting well was to get the hell out of there. I'd rather do nothing at home than pay many dollars to do nothing in a hospital. There's more, I'm sure (ask me about PICC lines), but I don't have the energy to continue at this point. You see, I'm sleepy. I spent last night in a tiny little room with a naked man who frequently shouted in his sleep, and twice managed to soil himself in the night.