Did you have this annoying experience in the hospital too?

Sometimes they are checking to make sure you are breathing and not in a coma.
And a needle stick once an hour sound like a lot.

Yes, I have been there and it can be irritating.

I was in the hospital for four days last year.

When they woke me up, I liked the distraction. I asked about the equipment and procedures.

I was woke up twice during the night to get morphine. The second time I told the nurse I was not in pain and didn’t need it. She said “you are paying for it, might as well use it.”
I was annoyed.

Want one better? I had just changed jobs and changed my insurance. I didn’t have my new cards. I had some severe stomach pain, so they admitted me suspecting an ulcer. I went to the crappy local hospital. They woke me up all night to ask if I had insurance.

It depends what you’re in for.

When I was kept over night for elevated heart enzymes they woke me to draw blood.

When I was in for a bad accident I don’t remember them waking me in the middle of the night.

@chyna That is so upsetting. Why would you be paying for a drug you didn’t take? Now I’ll watch for that sort of thing next time I am hospitalized.

When I was in the hospital, I was receiving about four pills a day. I then learned what each pill was for (bullshit that I didn’t need) and I told the nurse why I didn’t want them. I only take one pill per day, for a slow thyroid. They were waking me up at about 6 a.m. to give me that pill. I’d go to sleep around 12 or 1 and then get woken up at 6 for one pill. I told the doctor that when I am woken up, I am usually unable to return to sleep, and so the whole day I’d just be exhausted and feeling crappy. The doctor then put it in the orders for me not to be woken up for the pill.

Sometimes it pays to learn about what’s going on and then speak up to advocate for yourself.

@Adirondackwannabe and if you had said “no”, would they have asked you to vacate the bed?!

I had bleeding ulcers so in my case I can understand why they’d keep taking blood and do my blood pressure reading. My number was an 8 but I can’t think of the word. Now it’s an 11. But still, she claimed every person on the entire ward had to go through this extreme, exhausting annoyance.

@Aster: Who is “she?” The nurse or the doctor. I would discuss anything that annoys you with the doctor. The doctor has the authority to tell them to do or not to do something (as in the example I gave, where they were waking me up at the crack of dawn until the doctor told them to stop it).

Yes this has happened to me, they have to make sure you are okay. I have been at other hospitals where they don’t do this and I prefer that of course.

I was in for surgery a couple of years ago and while they didn’t keep waking me in the night, they did wake me much earlier than I was comfortable with, about 6.30am. I managed to go back to sleep for another hour or so until breakfast came around. I slept better that night than I did for the whole two weeks afterwards (probably because they gave me morphine?)

@jca the nurse , one of them, who took my blood and blood pressure every hour stated that they had been told to do this act of torture to everyone on the entire ward. I can’t imagine why she’d lie about it. As far as talking to my doctor about it I only saw him twice: when admitted and when dismissed. His name is on all my dismissal papers. I feel he saved my life. He has so many patients I’m not so sure I could have gotten him to even enter my room just to answer a question. It is an enormous hospital complex. I think his name was Dr Farouk. He’s an internal medicine doctor.