Living In The Hospital

The word "resident" was coined because at one point, poor sods like me would literally live in the hospital, or in an adjacent wing, all in the name of providing 24/7 care to patients.

But for some patients, they too could be "residents".

Some of them are waiting for a bed in a nursing home.

Some of them are dying in palliative care.

Some of them are destitute, too ill to care for themselves and without a soul who can do it at home.

And then there are those who are so neurotic they would rather live in the hospital under the care of us wonderful doctors who mutter and curse under our breaths when said patients arrive for the umpteenth time and are admitted under for their legitimate but all-too-chronic and unfixable condition because their anxiety is assauged simply by the knowledge that they are now Hospitalised in an Institution in which they will now receive Healthcare.

Tonight I am not feeling benevolent towards this fourth group of patients. They cost our healthcare system tens of thousands of dollars a year, shuttling by ambulance (because they can't afford a taxi) paid for by social services (to the tune of $130/trip - there go my taxpayer dollars) to present to the emergency room complaining of (insert chronic ailment).

In medicine, if you look hard enough, you can almost always find something wrong with someone's health. Myriad investigations get done for no real reason other than to cover one's ass before discharging a patient - and especially in this fourth group of patients, one is almost bound to find some abnormality that is "hospitalisable".

So they get admitted.

And then they stay.

And stay.

And stay.

And nothing you do to "fix" them ever works because - to their minds - it doesn't. They find ways and means to thwart all your efforts at "fixing" them so they can be discharged, because that means losing their secure little place in the bowels of the hospital surrounded by sick patients and various superbugs that inhabit this place.

I think they should have been doctors, then they could live in this place forever...

Just another random posting while on call in this dank place...