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.

Time for market! Well, soon, I'm not meeting the neighbors until 8:30. Then I'm thinking pedicure and some errands.

Trying to shake up my weekend schedule a bit, hopefully won't succumb to the siren call of napping cats.

I need to start figuring out what cookies to make for the thing in 6 weeks. I swear, this year WON'T involve fussy chopping or molding or filling or... I'll leave that to the Kats and Jules of the world. Last year's anzacs were good and I still have golden syrup and could do a variant of them easily, but 1) I try not to repeat and 2) oh god, chopping candied ginger, no.

I have a weakness for cookies with a little heat, thinking of chocolate+ a spicy liqueur. Somehow.

I'm off to the Catskills for another bout of cat-sitting, so depending on connectivity I may or may not be around online.

I'm realizing by the time I get back (less than a week) all my trees will have lost their leaves!

Timelies all!

I've been lucky. Haven't had an overnight stay in a hospital since I was 5 and had my tonsils and adenoids out. (I've had a couple of outpatient procedures, but that's it.)

I've never been a patient admitted to the hospital (since I was a newborn), but I have spent way too much time as a visitor over the past few months.