Day 617: The Birth Experience – Northside Hospital is an Inconsiderate Roommate

So, when I started my studies at the College of Charleston I took a room in Wentworth dorm and I was assigned the world worst roommate. To this day I am confused by our pairing. Apparently, CofC took my “ideal roommate personality” form, plugged the information into a super computer, and lit the computer on fire before throwing it off the top of the Empire State Building. This guy was the complete opposite of who I wanted to share space with. We’ll call him “Creep-Monkey”.

Anyway, Creep-Monkey had the strangest nightly tradition. Without fail, he would go out and get hammered. And then around 2 o’clock in the morning he would come home to our tiny walk-in closet of a dorm room. Struggle to get his keys in the door… normally dropping them multiple times… and when he finally opened the door the first thing he would do is turn the light on. I would normally react by covering my face with a pillow and he would say something unintelligible that kind of sounded like, “Uuu… oh… you asleep?” And then he would just stand there for a minute waiting for a response. The concept of “rhetorical” was lost on him.

Eventually Creep-Monkey would turn the light off. However, he never went to bed. He would sit down at the computer to play solitary and chain smoke for about an hour or two. The combination of the clicking and ashing never lead to a good night’s sleep for yours truly. But there wasn’t much point to going to sleep anyway, someone in the building usually set off the fire alarm by the time Creep-Monkey started exploring the idea of sleep.

Why am I sharing this story with you as part of “The Birth Experience” Series? Well, because my two nights in Northside Hospital’s Post-Partum Unit is the closest thing I’ve experienced to living with Creep-Monkey since college.

Seriously, every 45 minutes to an hour, a nurse would come into our room making zero attempts to keeping her presence unknown. And each time the nurse would purposefully wake Serena or Grayson to perform some “very important” task. They would check Serena’s blood pressure one hour and comeback the next hour to check her temperature. They would come to make sure Grayson had a clean diaper one hour and come back the next hour to make sure he wasn’t hungry. Each hourly visit would be from a different nurse performing a different task. This would go on all night long. And every time they would wheel some monstrous devise into the room just for giggles. I swear they even woke Serena up to make sure she was sleeping okay. I swear! In the end, no one slept at all the first few nights.

And by now… I think you’ve gotten the jist of the story. The folks over at St. John and Lizzies pretty much left us alone from 9pm until 6am, unless Serena activated the call button.

And when they did come… they would sneak into the room quietly to see how she was doing. And they would simply listen to her… never once insisting on performing some “important” task.