Lonely in an ICU
So, I made it to the ICU following some drama and excitement, cardiac shocks and all. And then the nurses fixed you up to a monitor, and the doctor explained everything; some very scary-looking gentleman came and dressed me in hospital clothes. After they put me into a gown, I lay, wires hanging from various parts of the body, staring at the roof as all the monitors on the ICU floor beep in succession, creating a monotonous crescendo. And then everyone leaves.
This was when the loneliness began!
Three things aggravate the sense of abandonment.
One is the changing shifts and the endless stream of new faces and hands handling everything for you. In the five days I spent in the ICU, I encountered three changes of nurses daily, with varying degrees of interest in helping you. The experts were typically at night who were swift, efficient, and highly impersonal. I don’t blame them, but they might as well have been robots helping me eat, pee, poop, and sleep. And then the morning shifts were all staffed by the freshers who were struggling between the mountain of paperwork, the genuinely sick patients who needed aid in moving from one side to the other, and the fact that everyone else was angry at their inefficiency. And worst, everyone is wearing a mask.
The second thing that made me lonely is the continuous beeping. Everyone is hooked up to an oversensitive monitor. And every monitor is misreading slight variations in a heartbeat as potential crashes with the nurses running around muting alarms. If you have ever been to a Hindu temple during the evening offerings of prayer when the bells are ringing out together, only slightly shifted from each other, that is what every p[assing minute, twenty-four hours, sounds like. And after a while, you lose count, and it is just one stream of thunderous noise.
The last thing that adds to this tremendous sense of loneliness is everyone staring at you. Nurses and doctors are trained or, by experience, begin to feel the same about all patients. Everyone speaks to you as if you are close to the end. Since the hospital decides to put anyone entering via the Emergency door into the ICU agnostic of triage, everyone gets treated as a severely afflicted patient, standing on the wall between life and the other side. Every “how are you?” is filled with cautious optimism, pity, and sympathy. Every time someone brings you the pot to pee in, there in the eyes of your nurse is the “poor you” expression. They don’t allow anyone much to visit, so you are stuck with people you don’t know treating you as disabled.
I know this will probably not be the last time this has happened to me. But I would not wish it on anyone.
