“Can I get transferred to another room? There must be another room open somewhere else in the hospital. The care in this department hasn’t been bad, it’s just that being in Pediatrics is so……unseemly!”, I said.
“I’m sorry, Professor Hawkins,” the doctor said with a look of real regret on his face, “Your privacy is a prime concern here. I’m sure that you appreciate that the University wants to minimize publicity about your accident. In Pediatrics your appearance doesn’t raise any eyebrows the way it would in another department. That’s the reason we’ve put you in the Pediatric Intensive Care room. You won’t have to share the room with anyone else during your stay here. There are other considerations too. Your size makes it difficult to treat you somewhere else in the hospital. At least in Pediatrics they have gowns and furniture that fits your body size. There are other…..items here in Pediatrics that are appropriate to your size.”
“Such as baby diapers?”, I said ironically.
“Exactly,” the doctor said, looking relieved that I had named the subject he had been skirting around.
“If you’re so concerned about my privacy, then why are the curtains by the windows open? I’d have thought that you’d have closed them if you were worried about people seeing me,” I said. I hadn’t thought about my privacy until he had brought the issue up, but once he had, I realized how potentially embarrassing it could be to have someone I knew observe the nurse changing my diaper.
The doctor looked at the nurse and said curtly, “Nurse, close those curtains immediately!”
The doctor looked at me apologetically and said in an obvious attempt to save face, “You’ve been slipping in and out of consciousness since you were brought in the hospital. This is the first time we’ve been able to talk to you and determine how lucid you were. We were concerned that you might have an episode which might require immediate intervention by one of the nurses. Now that I’ve talked to you and had a chance to examine you while you’re awake, I doubt that close observation will be necessary. You don’t have any history of epilepsy or other convulsive disorders, do you?”
I assured the doctor that I didn’t and he continued, “Any history of heart problems? No? Do you sleep walk or have a problem falling out of bed? No? Well, then I think we can get rid of the crib and put a regular hospital bed in this room.”
The nurse looked surprised by the doctor’s decision and whispered in the doctor’s ear urgently. The doctor looked embarrassed and said to the nurse, “Is this true? I can’t? Why isn’t this room bigger?”
The nurse looked at the doctor unhappily and said, “This was a storeroom that we converted last year when we remodeled. It was never designed as regular hospital room. After all, this IS a Pedi unit! We needed a room that could be easily seen from the nurse’s station and had room enough for a crib and chair. We knew it was tight at the time, but there was no other choice.”
The doctor gave the nurse a disgusted look and said, “I’ll take this up at the next board meeting. For now, we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. Are there any more rooms open in this unit?”
The nurse shook her head sadly at the doctor and said, “We’re full. He took the last bed we had. This is a very small unit, doctor. We don’t need that many pediatric beds because we’re a University Clinic. We have plenty of open beds in the other units. If he could be transferred to another unit I’m sure he could be accommodated.”
The doctor ignored her attempt to get her “problem child” transferred to another unit in the hospital. He had been embarrassed once when she had contradicted his decision about the hospital bed, he had no intention of letting himself be embarrassed again by having me transferred after he had just given me reasons why they couldn’t put me in another unit. He turned to me and said, “The nurse tells me that a regular hospital bed won’t fit in this room. I’m afraid that you’ll have to sleep in a crib for the balance of the time you are here. With luck, that will only be a few days.”
