This is going to be a rant and I am not going to hold back on this one, I'm going to talk about some nasty things.
Hospital infections are REAL! Joe picked up C-Diff diarrhea in the hospital. It was a horrible thing and took months and months to get rid of, and many medications and many specialists working on it, and a ton of money.
He picked up MRSA an antibiotic resistant staph infection.
He picked up a Klebsiella blood infection.
He picked up Klebsiella pneumonia.
I spent days, weeks and months hanging around hospital because Joe was so ill with his long medical history. I had a lot of time on my hands and time to observe and snoop around the rooms he was in looking for filth. Here is what I have found.
Not every medical person washes their hands, and that includes the doctors. Granted, now, they have those alcohol based hand sanitizing dispensers either in the rooms or in the hallway. Maybe they work as well, I am not so sure.
It isn't only medical personnel that come into your rooms. The housekeeping staff is moving from room to room cleaning the floors, the bathrooms, and other dirty things. Their shoes alone are enough to transfer germs from one room to another. Sure they use antibacterial stuff to clean, but they do not get into the crevices or detail the room on a daily basis, and probably never.
Then there are the food delivery personnel who come into every room.
Hospital floors are places where a lot of things happen, I don't want to be gross, but there are all kinds of eliminations happening on that floor, both in the room where the bed is and in the bathroom. That also goes for the furniture, the bed, the chairs both patient chairs and visitor chairs.
You may be in a room where someone or many others have had nasty infections.
I watched them strip down rooms after patients left. Yes, they go over things, but do they actually detail things, no, they don't.
The underside of the chair arm rests is a particular place for filth of all kinds, ditto the underside and top of the bed table. The side rails of the beds, especially the underneath portion of them is a filthy place. The telephone, all over it, including the cord is absolutely filthy. Hopefully, each patient will get their own new phone, but in many hospitals this is not the case. The television case and knobs are filthy, and probably the arm if you have that kind of TV.
Most male patients will place the full urinal on their bed table for the staff to empty. That's a given. Always, always ask someone to wipe down this tray table with the alcohol based hand sanitizer stuff and if you are going to place food on it, put down some paper towels after cleaning.
Things like Hoyer lifts can be filthy. I found some brown stains on the sling of one that they were going to use on Joe. If they never caught that, one wonders about the chains of that equipment, handles, etc.
Joe once had a diarrhea accident, he was very ill. The nurse was the one who came in to clean him and the mess up. She got some towels and cleaned things up, then placed the towels on the sink counter where he was placing his toothbrush and other toiletries. I almost had a stroke. I told her in no uncertain words what I felt about that.
You may have a roommate at some time in your stay. Your roommate may not be very well. One time, Joe had a roommate with a bad diarrhea condition. He wore diapers, and the staff would change him and leave the dirty diapers in the covered basket in the room. They rarely emptied this. It smelled to high Heaven. My feeling is that if you can smell it, there are particles lingering in the air. I was finally able to convince someone to take care of it. Who knows, he might have caught C-Diff from that place.
Hospitals have very, very ill people with all kinds of things wrong with them, many life-threatening. It is certainly plausible that they are never, ever cleaned thoroughly enough to eliminate all germs, even with antibacterials.
Here is what you can do to try to minimize the germ overload. Try not to touch the underside of anything. Ask for a new phone for yourself. If you are well enough to use the sink to wash up, place paper towels on all the surfaces before you put your toiletries down.
As mentioned above, wipe down your bed table with either soap and water or the alcohol based sanitizer, and if you have a water glass or other food on that table, put down paper towels first.
Ask for two wash basins, one for personal cleansing, and one for your face.
Bring hand sanitizer into the hospital with you and use it whenever you feel the need. Ask your wife or other loved one to wipe down the handles on the TV, edges of the bed table, bed handrails, chair hand rails, etc.
If you are going to be put into a chair for a while, ask them to get either a blanket or sheet to place on the chair first as a barrier. The seat of this chair has seen some action in the past, not all of it good, and there are a lot of crevices, hinges, pores in the fabric etc. that could harbor someone else's germs.
Make sure you see all the staff either wash their hands or use the hand sanitizer, and if you don't, tell them to do it. Too bad, if they are grumpy about it. They are supposed to be doing this.
Some of Joe's doctors wiped down their stethoscopes with alcohol before they used it on Joe, and others did not. I think that is a good idea. You don't want to have someone else's germs transferred that way.
There are limits to how long any IV can remain in one place in your arm. make sure you know just how long that is, and if it goes beyond that time limit, then complain about it until they get someone in there to place a new one in a different location. Blood infections can come from that.
Make sure that you have someone who will be with you as much as possible to help you and be your advocate and watch over you when you are sleeping, etc.
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