HOSPITAL TIME SLEEP DEPRIVATION

                          

    Having spent 22 days sleeping in the Memorial Sloane Kettering cancer hospital as a patient and then sleeping beside Dona Sadock who was a patient in the Mount Sinai hospital both in New York, I have been forcibly struck by both hospitals’ cavalier disregard for the human need for a proper night’s sleep.

   Mind you, these are elite institutions.  Sloane Kettering has a well-deserved reputation as the best cancer hospital in the world, with the inevitable occasional exception, the doctors, nurses, and nurses’ aids were all first rate, and even the food was quite good, and the same could be said for Mount Sinai..

   But both hospitals quite literally torture patients with the sort of sleep deprivation techniques used by the CIA, the Mossad, and the interrogators at Guantanamo.  In the wee hours of the morning--4:00 AM, 5:00 AM--you are abruptly awakened to have your blood pressure and temperature taken.  Maybe you succeed in falling asleep again, only to be awakened 20 minutes or so later to have blood taken, after which maybe replenishing the intravenous infusions, and then doctors’ rounds, whatever, so that by a civilized hour like 7:00 AM you have been repeatedly awoken several times.

  After a few days of this, you’re chronically sleep-deprived to the detriment of your general health and of course your recovery from whatever you’re in the hospital to be treated for.   If you’re savvy enough to realize this even though the doctors and nurses don’t seem to, you may try to compensate by going onto “Hospital Time,” trying to go to sleep by 9:00 PM or so in order to catch 5 or 6 hours of real sleep before you’re rousted for the first time in the very early morning, and by the time you leave the hospital, you’re both sleep-deprived and throughly zoned without leaving your time zone of origin.

    Inquiries reveal that this counterproductive practice is SOP at most hospitals.  Complain about it to doctors or nurses are answered with a shrug and the explanation that this is just the way it is, like it or not, unhealthy though it certainly is, Hospital Time is an ingrained facet of hospital culture.

  Obviously it damned well shouldn’t be.  It makes it harder for patients to recover, tends to increase hospital days because of the additional strain on the health of patients, and therefore also contributes to higher medical costs than if patients were simply allowed proper time for uninterrupted sleep.

  So two simple and reasonable suggestions for hospital administrators:

  1)Let the day start for patients no earlier than 7:00 AM. Forbid them to be awoken before then for anything short of true necessity.

 2)Combine all routine morning taking of various vital signs, replenishment of intravenous infusions, and so forth into one continuous visit, so that if the patient do manage to get back to sleep again, they are not woken up again and again at short intervals.

  Far from increasing hospital costs, it will reduce them by speeding recovery timed , or rather not impeding them with chronic sleep deprivation.  It may even make doctors and nurses more alert and competent by allowing them better sleep cycles too.

  My Dona generally recovers from minor illnesses by long sleeps, sometimes as long as 15 or even 24 hours.  I’m just not able to do this, but I wish I could.  A good night’s sleep may not always be the best medicine, but sleep deprivation is always metabolic poison.