Three Nights in the Hospital
At the end of February 2024, I was in Sunnybrook Hospital for three nights due to blood clots in my lungs. I can't say enough good things about the staff there and how I was treated: when I was admitted, a member of the pulmonary thrombosis department told me not to worry, that I was in good hands. And I was.
It was the first time I had been in the hospital for any length of time since I had my tonsils removed when I was six. I hope not to have to go to the hospital again for quite some time but it was an interesting experience to have as an adult.
Random thoughts, in no particular order:
I spent the first day and night in a bed in the emergency ward, since no beds had opened up in any other wing of the hospital. When you're in the emergency ward, your arm is attached to a blood pressure unit and your blood pressure is taken automatically every hour.
It's also quite noisy there - I might have gotten an hour or two of sleep. There's always lots of medical machines making pinging noises or whatever, and there's lots of people talking and doing stuff. The patient in the bed next to me was agitated because he wasn't sure what happened to his shoes; his friend, who had brought him to the hospital, kept reassuring him that he wouldn't lose his shoes, but the patient kept repeating his concern.I obviously didn't take many pictures while at the hospital, for privacy reasons, but I did manage to sneak a picture of a ceiling tile above my bed. Some volunteer artist or artists had decorated ceiling tiles above the emergency ward beds so that patients who were bed-bound at least had something to look at. It was a thoughtful gesture.
I almost forgot about the most surreal moment of my time in the hospital: while I was in the emergency ward, the phone rang and the caller ID read "Sunnybrook Hospital". When I answered it, I discovered that the caller was a volunteer who was soliciting donations to the hospital. She was a bit startled when I told her that, at that exact moment, I was a patient there.
I didn't think that the hospital food was all that bad but I don't exactly have a gourmet palate. The one issue was that there wasn't much of it: as in all institutional settings, everybody gets the same amount of food, and I'm a fairly large person who eats more than the average (even when I'm not eating too much). Fortunately, my wife and my sister brought snacks when they visited me, for which I was grateful.
When I was first in the hospital, they gave me a disposable container to use for when I, to put it euphemistically, had to do #1. Unfortunately, I have trouble with devices and gadgets of all kinds, so I had difficulty using this container for its intended purpose. When I was transferred to a room, I was grateful to the nurse who fitted me out with an extended oxygen tube for my nose, so that I could walk to the patient washroom and back when I needed to go.
When I was transferred to a room, I got the outer bed of a two-person room. The person on the inner half was hidden by a curtain, so I couldn't see him. But I could hear him: he was suffering from dementia and was in some mental distress. He kept calling out his relative's name (I believe it was Elmer) and shouting things such as "excuse me" and "help" and other things in his first language (which I guessed was Polish). He did this all day and most of the night - thankfully stopping for a bit to allow me to sleep - until, the next day, warders came for him and took him to a longer-care facility. They were going to put in another roommate for me on the second night I was in the room but didn't get around to it, so I had the room to myself for the third night and last day I was in the hospital.
The room had a patient whiteboard for me but no one had updated it to include my information, instead still listing info for the previous occupant, whose name was Janet. I didn't want to be called Janet, so I erased the whiteboard. Here's the second and only other photo I took when I was in the hospital, of the erased whiteboard:
The treatment for blood clots is to inject some sort of anti-clotting medication into your hip twice a day. Fortunately, I responded quite quickly to treatment and was in reasonable shape by the third day I was there. I only had to stay a third night because our townhouse has stairs and they wanted to make sure I could climb up them without oxygen assistance. They tested this on the fourth day - I remember being nervous, as if about to take an exam. Fortunately, I passed.
I had a bunch of other interesting treatments and monitoring while I was in the hospital. One side of the human heart is basically responsible for interacting with the lungs, while the other half does the other stuff (this might not be completely scientifically accurate). When I was admitted, they discovered that the lung half of my heart was slightly enlarged because it had been working harder due to the blood clots - in fact, that's how the emergency room physician diagnosed my problem.
Because of this, they hooked me up to a monitor that had taped attachments to various parts of my body, presumably to check that my heart and lungs were working properly. The nursing station on my ward tracked the monitor 24/7 - I know this because one of the wires came unhooked in the early morning hours and a nurse immediately came in to check on me.
I was also taken to what I think was an ultrasound machine a couple of times - it was a machine that looked like a giant dryer with brightly coloured lights around its entrance. They wanted to see if my blood clots came from somewhere else in my body (they never did find what caused them).
To go to the ultrasound machine, I got into a wheelchair, along with the binder containing my patient notes. An orderly then wheeled me into the ultrasound room, and I went into the giant dryer and back out again. Afterwards, I had to wait in the anteroom for about an hour until an orderly came and got me again (no complaints - they're obviously very busy). This was probably my least favourite moment of my hospital stay - I sat there, bored and with nothing to do, and stared at the wall until they came and got me.
While I was in the hospital, I was basically free of all adult responsibilities. I could sit there and play games on my iPad. All I had to do was be available to have my blood pressure taken and blood work done, or whatever else the medical staff wanted from me.
When you're discharged from the hospital, you don't have to go down to the front desk and get stamped out or anything like that - you just take your discharge papers and go. So I went.
I mentioned this before but it bears repeating: everybody at Sunnybrook Hospital was professional, friendly, and awesome. I have nothing but good things to say about my stay there. I am grateful beyond words to be back to living a normal life - as my family doctor put it, I am a very lucky guy. Without modern medicine, I would not be here writing this.
April 2026