The nurse left the room and the young nurse that had change my diaper returned with a remote control switch and plugged it into an intercom unit mounted into the wall. She fed the cable over the head of the crib and clipped it to the sheet on the outside of the mattress. After demonstrating the use of the call button, she canceled the call by depressing the cancel button on the intercom panel and said, “Your lunch will be here in about two hours. Why don’t you try and take a nap until then?”
I looked at the bare mattress I had been sleeping on the night before and said, “Could I have a blanket and pillow to sleep with? I’m not used to sleeping on a bare sheet without a comforter. I doubt that I’ll be able to get any sleep without one.”
“Certainly,” the nurse said, “I’ll get them, right now. Just wait here and I’ll be back in a jiffy!”
She left the room to go get a blanket and pillow, leaving me wondering how she expected me to get out of the crib with the side rails up. It was just a figure of speech, but the idea of getting out of bed without her help made me smile. If she came back and found me out of the crib, she’d probably panic. The thought of her running to the nurse’s station, yelling that she had lost her patient gave me a perverse sense of satisfaction. Maybe I’d try it later, I thought with a grin. Right then I was sleepy and a nap sounded like a good idea.
She returned a few minutes later with a small pillow and blanket. It was obvious that the Pediatric Unit had purchased them solely for use in a crib. The blanket was a gender neutral aqua-green and the pillow was too small to be used by anyone but an occupant of a baby crib. She put the pillow on the mattress at the head of the crib and had me lie down so she could cover me with the blanket. I was amused by her ministrations; she tucked the blanket around my body as if I was a small child who could not handle a blanket by himself. The maternal look she gave me as she hovered over me to tuck me in reminded me of how my mother looked when I was a child. In a few minutes I was snug under the blanket and began to fall asleep, secure in the knowledge that she wouldn’t let me miss lunch. I smiled drowsily when the thought hit me that she would probably want to fed me like I was a toddler. They were having difficulties with having a baby-sized adult patient in the hospital. I had no intention of making their lives any easier by being agreeable. I’d do everything in my power to thwart their policies and make sure they treated me like an adult. It was too much fun to be a pain and I was bored. I looked forward to making everyone’s lives miserable by demanding my rights. I closed my eyes and drifted off to the sound of a small child crying in distress somewhere in Pediatrics. They hadn’t heard the last from me!