Hospitals

Scoble has spent some time in a hospital near Microsoft’s offices caring for a loved one.  As you may have expected, he has been camped out there with his laptop.  His earlier posts about his hospital experience have been about the stress of waiting:

Lots of waiting in hospitals like the one I’m writing to you from.
Waiting. Waiting. Then some terrifying moments shatter the silence.
Mostly of doctors telling you more surgery is needed. Or worse.
Thankfully I’m not hearing those bad words like cancer or, worse,
"don’t know." I hear Peter Jennings just found out that he has lung
cancer. A friend of mine died of that in the 1980s. But others are
hearing those horrible words all around me. In my room it’s not
cakewalk. There’s constant intrusions. Blood pressure checks. Blood
workups. Flowers! Bathroom walks. New IV’s. Phone calls. Beeping
machines. Even some running Windows! (Can’t they make nicer sounding
beeps?) Room-mates making weird noises. No privacy for some things that
otherwise are very private.

His posts since Thursday have been about possibilities:

People ask me what the software industry’s future is. All I do is look around
this hospital room (which is in one of the richest hospitals in the world) and I
see tons of opportunities.

The patient’s chart, for instance, is all paper and hand-done. How many
inefficiencies (and opportunities for mistakes) are there there? Tons.

Then I look at the machines hooked up here. There’s a blood transfusion
device. An IV device. An oxygen monitor. A heart-rate monitor. None of these
machines talk with each other. None report back to the patient’s chart. After
all, how could they? That’s all paper stored in a binder by the door of the
room.

Julie Leung has had a different experience with hospitals, one focussed more on the stress of being in hospitals:

no intrusions please

For most of my life I’ve
never been excited about hospitals. I spent too much of my childhood in
them. Giving birth to my children revealed these feelings raw. My first
labor was hard because I didn’t get along well with my nurses. I didn’t
like being in the hospital. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want
all the intrusions and interruptions (as Robert described so well).
Once we arrived, my labor slowed: it was psychological.

waiting for the blogpost

Waiting in the waiting room
is difficult. I haven’t spent many hours recently hanging out in a
hospital. But I have waited for phone calls, emails and blogposts. I’ve
waited to hear the news that it would be all right. I’ve wanted to hear
that ring or see that the baby arrived and is healthy. I keep checking
the clock, refreshing the browser window, examining the email, making
sure the phone is on. Time feels like torture when we are waiting.

I remember those feelings when I used to visit my dad first in hospital and later in a hospice two years ago.