The Corner Hospital Room

We are in the hospital for another 4 day stint. This time, we are in a "corner" room.

Walking the halls, I had seen these rooms, or at least the outside door of one. What was inside? I wondered. A larger room? A better layout?

I was curious (I am eternally curious and hope that the thing about curiosity and the cat is just hyperbole), but never once did I actively wish to be in one of these mysterious rooms. I was too afraid that they were reserved for the dire cases, the ones who ... well, you know.

Well.

What I thought was the door to the room is actually a door to a kind of closet/storage thing that the nurses go into many times a day to get supplies. You go in, and then there's another door, and that leads into our room. So ... I now have twice as many doors to navigate through with a 3 year old and an iv pole.

Clock on the wall ... 5 hours fast.

Trash can that is inside a cabinet -- normally, it rolls, and has a big handle in front, so that you can pull it out, step on a pedal, and it opens. Sanitary.

No wheels. No handle. Must open it the 1 inch it will raise while under the cabinet, grab the side and scrape/drag it out of the cabinet. Not sanitary.

I know, wah, wah. Whine, whine.

Bathroom.

Layout is different, so that the toilet is on the back wall, rather than by the door. In order to take LW in to use the bathroom (which is approx every half hour, because they flush her kidneys with fluid the whole time we're here), I must unplug her iv pole from the wall, put a neutral plug in her monitor input plug so alarms don't sound, pull it around the bathroom door, open the bathroom door, lift it over the doorway, get her clothes down and her on the toilet (actually, over the "hat" in toilet, because they measure her output), get her off the toilet, clothes back up, "walk to the bed, LW!", lift the iv over the doorway threshold, lift her back onto the bed, plug everything back in.

Round about that time, she needs to go again. Just kidding. Barely.

Right now, it's just annoying, all the plugging and lifting of Mr. IV pole. But I'm willing to bet at 2:30 in the morning ...

So, my point and I do have one, is that sometimes, the magic corner room is actually the overflow room, the one they use when everything else is full up, the one where broken equipment goes and bad layout lives.

I imagine there's a moral in that, but I'll have to think about it later. Right now, LW needs to pee.