I lost my temper at a nurse today. On the one hand, I feel bad. On the other, it's something that I've been wanting to say for a long fucking time now.
This probably doesn't mean much to most of you, but I'm going to vent anyway, and it's going to be a bit long. Sorry.
RANT STARTS HERE:
Every time David goes into the hospital, his doctors put him on contact isolation. Which:
- Is a huge pain in the ass.
and
- is ridiculous and utterly unnecessary.
They want people in his room to wear a full isolation gown, gloves, mask, the whole shebang. This sounds like reasonable precautions, until you start to take into account, you know. Reality. Like, for instance, the fact that if he and I were going to share something with each other, we would have already done so before he ever got here.
The mask I can understand. The gloves I can even understand. But the gowns? Ridiculous. I don't fit into them. (My arms are literally too big to get into the sleeves. I can't get them past my elbows.) They adamantly refuse to order a bigger size so that I can get my arms into them. And then they bitch at me for not wearing them.
Uh, ok. Except that I can cite at least ten studies that show that isolation gowns have no benefit when it comes to the reduction of nosocomial respiratory infections, because they're just a ritual part of hygiene control. They don't, by themselves, have any significant association with virus reduction. Hemorrhagic fevers, like ebola? Yes. Not things like coronavirus. The studies which do show some benefit show mixed results at best, and are usually done on infants and toddlers to reduce RSV infection rates (though even those tend to show that cohort nursing tends to be better at prevention). Also understandable.
But gowns for adults? I know they don't work. The nurses know they don't work. His own doctors know they don't work, because one of them published a study last year showing next to no efficacy when gowns are added in addition to masks and gloves.
If you're going to come at me for some bullshit because you won't order the correct sizes of things, after I've shown you for almost a decade that I can't get my arms into them, at least have the decency to acknowledge that it's not the kind of crisis you're pretending it is.
I don't go into the rooms of other patients.
Not that it matters, since I have to take all this shit off before leaving the room, so it literally only applies in here.
And I am in this room long enough that these precautions as a whole are laughably ineffective at keeping me from becoming a carrier, anyway, so if I was gonna mask and gown up, I should be doing that when I leave.
Fuck, man.
Ok, rant over. I'm gonna call the doctors again and ask, again, about getting the bigger gowns. Even though it never happens.