What do you think of hospital television viewing?

Haven’t got the patients…

I have been in hospital for various reasons in 5 different states and have never had the experience that you describe. The televisions were all adequate, and there was a wide choice of programming options.

That is only true if the last person set it to Telemundo and took the clicker with them when they left.
You have plenty of channels: all the usual ones plus a few that are shilling drugs. They are hilarious.

A few years ago I was hooked up to a IV for three days and all I had was the tv. We got the full deal. Even HBO.

I always preferred listening to music in hospital.

Mom was in the hospital for over a month two years ago. She and the roommates had individual TVs that swiveled out from the wall behind the headboards so that they could be easily adjusted to the viewer’s physical position. Great reception and plenty of channels.

i must say, watching TV while stoned to the gills on Demerol makes the viewing so much more pleasurable, as you wait for that dratted stone to pass.

But for all that, I could never even find a Spanish station (in L.A.) and there was always a TV in the room. Ever since the 1960s.

The 3 times I was in the hospital was in a 4 bed ward so you had to watch what the nurse put on for you. This was in the late 60’s and early 70’s when TV pretty much sucked.

Many years ago, I spent 2 nights in a hospital. I didn’t have that experience at all; the TV options were fine, and Paul and I got to watch a Redskins game together.

Of course, “I Dream of Jeannie” becomes very profound when one’s floating on painkillers…

I spent some time in the hospital and then in a rehab center this fall. TV was the standard fare of all the networks and all the thousand or so cable channels. Occasionally I would put the closed captioning into French or Spanish to divert myself from the Monk reruns. Pain meds made it all blurry.

When I was in the hospital last month they had cable, but only limited channels – no premium settings. So I tuned it to the channel guide that had “smooth jazz” in the background and left it there to try to drown out all the other noises (including the other people’s TVs).

My first overnight stay in the hospital I was too busy going through back labor to pay attention to the television. My husband found some comedy movie with Robin Williams at one point, I vaguely remember.

The second time was for abdominal surgery, and I had my laptop with me. I took advantage of the hospital WiFi to watch Firefly on Hulu.