I find bright, empty hallways to be very creepy, especially at night. It takes away your ability to pretend nothing's there. Which sounds stupid when compared to "empty", but if the monsters don't have shadows to hide in, neither do you.

I got yer dark workplace.

Oddly I always think the Kaiser I go to feels like a movie set because there's so much constant foot traffic, like a pack of extras used to make it look busy.

and it's all due to the staff who don't give a fuck that there are patients trying to sleep and are miserable.

I admit that I am sensitized to this topic right now, but I need to defend hospital staff. I was so moved by how kind and caring and respectful all the staff were to my sister. She wasn't an easy patient, but they were all very patient with her.

Hospital hallways are never as deserted as they are in horror movies, either (shocker). They do dim the lights at night, but nothing is ever completely dark.

None of the hospitals I've stayed in with my parents even dimmed the corridors near their rooms. The therapy rooms and lounge areas might go dark, but all the working hallways stayed lit up with those ghastly flourescent lights at full strength.

I need to defend hospital staff. I was so moved by how kind and caring and respectful all the staff were to my sister. She wasn't an easy patient, but they were all very patient with her.

Yeah, I don't doubt every workplace has it's gossiping and non-job related bustling and noisemaking, etc, but the nights I've spent in the hospital have largely been miserable because the nurses keep tending to the patients 24/7, and because sometimes you have to call doctors in at weird times (or they were dealing with a crisis until a moment ago, and do you want them now, or after breakfast?).

One of the most depressing "I'm not going to sleep, am I?" was in the neuro ward sharing a room with a woman who got hysterical unless there was music playing. It wasn't bad music, but I really wanted quiet. But what can I do?

So, no one using Evernote for recipes wants to share? I don't have that many, but I think it would be fascinating...

I do! I think I need to make a notebook for sharing, though? My recipes are just scattered through my main notebook and tagged, I can't just share a tag, can I?

Should be pretty straightforward, though. I'll look into it tomorrow.

The night of my hysterectomy, my morphine pump kept malfunctioning, and I wasn't getting morphine when I hit the pump, AND the alarm on it kept going off every 20 minutes. And I shared a room with an older woman, 50-ish, who was a moaner.

After the pump sitch got figured out, I still could pass out because of all her moaning really loudly ("OOOOOOOOHHHHHH IT HURTS AHHHHHH OHHHHHH") for the last three hours and I told the nurse who came in for a 3 AM check that I thought maybe something was wrong. Turns out she had a broken ankle and was also on a morphine pump. I was not very sympathetic after that, and finally snapped at 4:30 and hissed "Will you PLEASE be quiet!"

Silence, then "My foot hurts!"

"I just got my guts ripped out and didn't get meds for 3 hours because of this damned machine and did you hear me ONCE? And now I can't get to sleep."

"It hurts."

"I hurt worse. Please be QUIET."

She shut up. I'm not proud, but I was in a lot of pain even with the finally-working morphine and really tired at that point, and she was driving me batshit crazy. I wouldn't have snapped if she'd been old or a kid, and if I hadn't known it was a broken ankle that she was getting freakin' IV pain meds for.

I spent five days in a hospital one time, and it was really hard to fall asleep or stay asleep. I don't blame the staff, it's just hard for me to sleep in a hospital, being a person who's kinda hypervigilant even in normal times when I'm not possibly about to die. The nurses' desk was two doors down and I could hear the alarms going off and everything that was going on. The worst thing was, one night, the man in the room next to me died, apparently not totally unexpectedly, and his sister just lost her mind - running in and out of the room, screaming and wailing, slamming her hands on the wall, blaming the doctors. They finally gave her a sedative and put her in a room. Poor lady, but still, she woke everyone on the floor and scared the patients.

Yes, hospitals are not restful places and horrid for an insomniac, even with morphine. I was in for 3 days with the hyst, and when I got to my folks' house, I went straight to (blissfully silent) bed and slept 10 hours. I was exhausted. I had mostly really nice nurses, but they do have to wake you up for stuff, and the places are noisy.