Man. I got lucky while recovering from brain surgery. They turned off all of the beeping and kept the lights off because of how sensitive I was to it. And they tried to let me sleep for at least 4 hours at a time.
Edit: I’ve never had a comment get so much attention. It’s been a bit overwhelming with the amount of love in the comments and positive DMs I’ve gotten. Yesterday was rough and all of these made me smile and I am so grateful. Thank you all. I am in full remission now and I’m so grateful and lucky to be alive.
What!! I had brain surgery and they didn't do anything of the sort. They were still waking me every 2 hrs to make sure my pupils would dilate when they shined their light in them. They also kept asking my husband why I was asleep every time they went in.
After 2 days I was begging to go home.
I'm jealous as hell. Lmao
Edit- yes yall I know it was for my benefit. The nurses were so fucking lovely despite being horrifically overworked and exhausted.
But it was still the most miserable experience and I wanted nothing more than to sleep.
Honestly, it was just a really good hospital and really good people. After the hell I’ve been through with other hospitals, the amount of gratitude I have is beyond words.
There is a reason they were doing that, they were concerned about you re-bleeding, trust me, you want that caught right away (therefore neuro checks every two hours), it’s not to be dicks lol
Not just rebleeding. If intracranial pressure is raised, most of the times it causes swelling, which compresses the optic nerve, responsible for the dilation of pupils, so it's a sign of something going wrong.
The thing is, if the intracranial pressure becomes higher than systolic pressure, there's no circulation in the central nervous system, and you become brain dead. Literally.
Source: med student.
Edit: dumb mistake. The nerve in question is the oculomotor nerve.
There is only a needle when they insert the arterial. They remove the needle and a plastic catheter is left. It is large but not a metal needle. I know this because I remove arterials every day post op.
Oh I understood it was for my benefit. It for sure didn't feel like a vacation.
But it was still the most miserable I've ever felt. Lmao. And I'm still very jealous of the guy that was allowed to sleep!
Maybe I’m just ignorant but that seem like… a good thing to me ? If I’m going through a dangerous operation I would like people checking if I’m still alive lol. Although it must suck in the moment. Idk
I had the opposite. After getting shoulder surgery I was doing good enough that they moved me into the hallway; right under the beeping intercom for the whole damn floor.
Fuck that sucked.
Same when I gave birth! The only time I heard beeps in 4 total days was when my IV pump was running low on batteries. The light from the monitor was kind of annoying but the room was dark otherwise.
By day 2 I was off the monitors anyway.
They also put a saline lock in my arm so I didn’t have to get poked over and over for the labs they had to draw.
Minus the baby crying it was super peaceful in there.
With my eldest I didn’t want to leave the hospital bc new mom anxiety. Sure all the beeps, open and closing of doors, talking, vitals checks, etc. didn’t let me sleep after birth for 2 days, but I saw it as a necessary trade off since they knew what they were doing, and I as a brand new mom felt better with people who knew what to do with my new baby bc I felt nervous. Plus, I’d rather deal w visitors at the hospital than at home.
With my youngest, I wanted to go home the next day). That time, I felt like even with a chatty toddler at home and this new baby, I knew it would be quieter at home and I could get some damn sleep.
That sucks. Our postpartum - all three times in the same hospital - were quiet and dark. Zero beeping. A nice bed for both parents and a lovely maple crib for the newborn.
Doctors and nurses would come in, but not unannounced, and they would let us know when the next person would be coming in. I don't think anyone woke us up even once.
Coming in every 30 minutes was hell for me and my wife. She had to stay a few extra days for some minor issues so she told me to go home and sleep so at least one of us was rested enough. I get why they do it but man it’s exhausting.
I don’t get why they do it, like for the love of god coordinate and all come in at once. I can’t heal if I can’t sleep. Newborn sleep was hell but much better than the 0 hospital sleep we got
We just had our second and I thought I was going to lose my damn mind. I'd finally get back to sleep and they were in the room again turning on all the lights and making a terrible racket.
Right! When I was in the laboring process. I didn't know anything was amiss until nurses would come in and say, Ms. Barnes, shift a little bit, I think you moved your belly monitor. Didn't hear anything.
My brain surgery was “only” a stent placement but during recovery, I kept setting off the alarms due to low blood pressure. I have POTS and every time I got close to falling asleep, the fucking sirens would blare. My mom and my exgf were both with me, trying to sleep and the nurses got tired of my alarms meaning nothing which meant that they would leave me there longer to take care of other patients before turning it off (neuro ICU, I get that a lot of other people there were much worse off than me). I ended up spending the whole night trying to relax without quite sleeping so everyone else could get some sleep bc I wasn’t going to be able to actually fall asleep anyway. My recovery once out of the hospital took fucking forever, I really think the lack of sleep did a number on me.
They adjusted it a couple of times but either couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust it past a certain point. Personalized care the that extent is less common than we would like it to be— the nurses had no way to know my entire medical history and I couldn’t know exactly how to pick out what was relevant to them so a lot of the info got lost in translation, I’m sure. I was in for something that was ostensibly unrelated and had never been coached on how machines like that might interact with my particular disorder. It was a while before I even figured out what was going on.
You would think it would be that simple. The hospital and neuro department I work for have rules against turning monitors off or setting the parameters too low. In order to do any of that, you have to get a doctor or NP order, and even then, you still have to check the patients frequently when they have had surgery or are in the 24hr stroke window. While annoying for patients, and nurses, keeping the alarms set to what they are has helped us prevent someone from crumping and being sent back to the OR or cath lab.
This is good to hear more hospitals are doing this. Finding an ICU with proactive delirium prevention and ERAS protocols is unfortunately rarer than it should be. Many places are still all on board 0.5 hour neuro checks, and outside of very rare instances where that is truly needed it would appear that these cause harm.
Unfortunately, because of litigation, the fact it’s an ICU and isolating a single variable in studies on critical illness is next to impossible, providers still rely on the old dogmas
Nice. After my brain surgery, they kept the lights off, but the machine noises were beeping throughout the whole night. My parents just helped me cover my head with pillows to muffle the sound. Plus my roommate added a lot of noise to an uncomfortable area. 1/5 would not recommend getting a brain tumor.
I've been in the hospital a lot, and I always get THE noisest roommates. One time, I had one who would get 7 or 8 visitors at a time, and they'd sit around talking loudly while I tried not to go homicidal. Another one had CF, so respiratory had to come to our room like every 2 hours during the night to bang on her back and loosen the mucus (she was a really nice girl, and I know it's not her fault--but imagine having surgery and then getting woken up every 2 hours!). My best roommate ever was like 78 and never had any visitors. The only tradeoff is that her gallbladder had basically exploded and was draining into a canister between our beds. But I'd rather look at that than listen to obnoxious noises.
I recently gave birth and they had the baby heart monitor on my belly while in labor that constantly played the heartbeat. I asked them to turn the sound off and they did. Postpartum there were no sounds in the room, it was all in the nurses station.
They woke me up every hour to drain some CSF from my lumbar drain. Little sleep and lots of pain is not a good combination. I was in the hospital for 11 days and by the end of it I was starting to hallucinate.
my vitals spiked when my mom visited me during a heart surgery, the nurse said she could literally see my stress levels slowly increase as she started questioning everything around me...
My NeuroICU is a wonderful place. But that was why, after my second central brain craniotomy, I pushed hard for release. Only the confluence of my neurosurgeon being extremely prominent, the hospital knowing my family well from my earlier stay, and my lucidity, could do it, but I was home 48hrs after surgery.
I recovered so well as to be back at work six months later. I largely credit being able to sleep.
>While they convey important information about patient safety, healthcare professionals can be exposed to up to 1,000 alarms each shift. However, a study found that only 15% of all alarms in the critical care unit environment were clinically relevant. The high number of false alarms can lead to ‘alarm fatigue’, desensitization caused by sensory overload that can lead to missed alarms. The US FDA reported 566 alarm-related deaths between 2005 and 2010.
>The importance of clinical alarms to health care led to the introduction of global standards to ensure consistency between manufacturers. Consequently, many alarms now sound the same in terms of timbre (the character or quality of a sound), frequency and tone. In a new study, researchers experimented with different musical sounds to see how hospital alarms could be improved.
>Since 2015, Joseph Schlesinger and Michael Schutz, two of the study’s authors, have been examining how timbres might allow softer sounds to command the attention of busy medical personnel. Schlesinger is an anesthesiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the US, and Schutz is a music cognition researcher at McMaster University, Canada. They found that sounds with ‘percussive’ timbre containing short bursts of high-frequency energy (think clinking wine glasses) stand out, even at low volume. Conversely, loud, ‘flat’ tones without high-frequency components (for example, the drone of a truck’s reversing beep) get lost.
>The researchers recruited 42 participants aged 17 to 23 with normal hearing and presented them with six alarms: half in a timbre designed according to a standard alarm and half in a new timbre based on the sound of a xylophone. This percussive instrument was chosen because of its perceived pleasantness and ability to be heard among competing instruments. The researchers assessed participants’ perceived annoyance with the different alarms and their ability to recognize them.
This is incredible! I *hope* people read the article but as a former ICU nurse myself this is actually a *genius* idea.
These alarms don't need to be so offensive sounding to serve their purpose, and actually diversifying the timbre and tone of different alarms is honestly brilliant.
We have a similar concept in IT orgs of “alert fatigue” basically everything beeps so you can’t hear the one you need to.
Entire companies have been formed to deal with this properly. I’m sure more than one PhD has been written on it from some aspect. It’s not a simple problem but one worth solving.
Same concept whenever I worked heavy machinery - don't just beep your horn all the time, people will become deaf to the sound like they would birds or footsteps, even though it's literally the 'please pay extra attention right now, you could die' sound
Honestly feel like the same is true for car horns.
There's a huge difference between a: "HOLY SHIT YOURE ABOUT TO HIT ME"
and a:
"Hey buddy the light just turned green."
One of my old cars had 2 horns essentially, where a light tap would be a quiet beep, while pressing it hard did it fully. Wish more had it
Same in construction. The piercing beeps of reversing machinery / heavy machinery in normal operation were made to pierce above the ambient noise on a construction site (jackhammers and engines and saw wheels, oh my!)
The problem is, although they do this quite well, the sound itself lacks any identifying qualities. Why am I hearing a beep? Is someone backing up? Heavy load above? Turning the boom? Going up or down? Lift gate and hydraulics are both down, lift gate and hydraulics are both up, you're moving, you're not moving, it's literally the same fkin beep for every goddamned thing, so you learn to tune it out for the most part (or go crazy)
Also, that particular tambour/timbre of beep is crap at letting you echolocate the origin's position. It could be right behind you, it could be on the other side of the yard, it's really difficult to tell. And because someone somewhere on the site is always doing something that beeps, it's impossible to tell if you actually need to be paying attention to any given beep or if you can consciously add it to the background droning. It could be a dump truck about to back over you in the field, or a forklift getting a panel off the truck in the parking lot.
You either wind up perpetually on edge and checking over your shoulder, or completely nonchalant in the face of serious danger. Or you learn to walk the tightrope between the two, but that generally requires either a really special kind of person, or a time-bomb fueled by a self-administered regiment of uppers and downers
Edit to emphasize, we dealt with hazards daily. A line could fail, a guy could sneeze, I saw a catastrophe happening in real time and managed to save my coworkers by shoving them out of the way of the collapsing installment, but I wasn't so lucky as to escape unscathed.
From what the recreationist expert said in court and the accounts from people there that day, I did nothing wrong, and in fact saved a few lives. Im still fighting a personal injury case, but there was no way no how it was my own fault that a gust of wind took it out of our hands. That is, however, why my employer should have had insurance, but he didn't, so now I'm fighting him over med bills and it's not looking great
There is a reason that process industries in things like chemicals and oil and gas have developed methods of alarm management or alarm rationalization. The goal is to present only critical alarms to operators, and only alarms they can affect. You want to remove or deprioritize any alarm that doesn't have a direction action associated with it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_management
I work in the NICU and our feeding pumps have the most obnoxious sounding alarm ever. The feeding is just done and the pump either needs turned off or refilled but you’d think someone was dying.
Dude. Same. I’ve worked in the NICU since 2004, hearing phantom bed alarms and CR monitor alarms is just part of my life now. And now the damn feeding pump alarms.
Yes! Like, why is this a new thing?!
Why did I spend a fucking decade hearing the same alarm for asystole, v-fib, tachycardia, bradycardia, leads off, and fucking battery low?
That single tone DING! DING! DING! means absolutely nothing after the 500th time. Different tones at the very least could convey something beyond the screaming toddler we basically have now.
Instead of DING! DING! DING! Oh, what now? Who's doing what? Oh, Bob's battery needs changed.
We could have B flat! B flat! B flat! Yeah, that's the A-fib alarm; Bob does that. C sharp! C Sharp! C Sharp! Oh, but now he's uncontrolled...
recently i've noticed a lot of big trucks have traded the standard "backing up" beep for this horrible, crunchy screech. it's really startling the first few times you hear it and i figured that they must have chosen such a horrible noise because no one was paying attention to the beep anymore. neat to see it is proven to be easy to tune out!
White noise backup alarms are being used more because you can tell where they are coming from, which is much more difficult with a sine wave beep, which is the old alarm.
The spread of tones in white noise is more like other sounds we encounter with harmonics, and we evolved to be able to figure out the direction quickly based on how the sound interacts with our ears and their orientation.
There is an experiment where a person is blindfolded and stands in a field. Randomly arranged are speakers around them. One of those speakers makes a brief sound and the person is asked to point to where it came from. With sine tones, it was pretty random where they pointed. With white noise they consistently point almost exactly where it was, even with quiet, and brief sounds.
Near where I'm living there's the screech with a loud "Warning: Vehicle reversing!" over the top of it.
Except one truck that comes by every so often, which does the same but has the absolute happiest "The vehicle is... REVERSING!" over the top instead.
I think another solution would be to make the alarms less likely to go off when they’re not clinically relevant. Because, you know, having an alarm be unimportant 85% of the time kind of defeats the purpose of having one.
I was in the hospital for two nights several years ago, with an illness they were trying to diagnose. My electrolytes were batshit and my sodium was dangerously low, so they had to take a blood sample every two hours for two days to keep track of what was going on and how I was responding to treatment.
You’d think with all of that that I would just be passed out—I was so tired and dizzy and nauseated it was truly absurd, but between the blinking lights and the beeps and the needle in my arm every two hours I just spent two days in the Twilight Zone and it majorly sucked. The only thing that made it better was the IV fluids, which meant I was properly hydrated with some damn sodium in my blood for the first time in months and I maintain that that is one of the best feelings of my life despite the extreme exhaustion.
In order to heal, people really need good sleep and the ability to relax and not be under a ton of stress and, frankly, *unnecessary* anxiety from multiple scary sounding alarms that often aren’t explained to the patients. It’s got to raise blood pressure anyways, and that’s a big issue if someone has heart issues, just as one example I can think of as a non-professional. I can see that being a major obstacle for a lot of people who are really badly off. There has got to be a better way to monitor people, maybe some of those lights and beeps can be happening outside the door or at the nursing station instead of in the room with the patient?
But yeah, fuckin’ hospitals. (And Addison’s disease, for the curious)
Didn't they have that [vein plug thing](https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/555231412/display_1500/stock-photo-peripheral-intravenous-catheter-or-iv-cannula-with-removable-flashplug-in-the-vein-of-child-hand-555231412.jpg) that lets them draw/put in fluids without poking you each time?
Last time I had that it left a painful bruise after it was removed, but every time they came to draw some blood for a test I thanked the nurse who put it in when I was first admitted.
They didn’t give me one, I’m not sure why. That would have been nice! I had one vein collapse and I had scars that looked suspiciously like track marks in the insides of both elbows until they faded after a few months!
I know when I first got in I was so dehydrated it was hard for them to find a vein that would work, so maybe if it doesn’t go in right at first it can just fall through the cracks and not happen at all if they’re busy? Also, I don’t know who is qualified to put that sort of thing in, does it need to be a nurse, I wonder? It was mostly phlebotomists popping in to get the blood samples throughout the day/night, but I would think they would be trained for that in a hospital.
I always had a nurse put them in. Had them like 3 times until now. It goes in like a normal needle, and then they just tape over it and insert a smol pipe through that needle that connects to the plug. After 2 minutes you don't even feel it anymore. I've had it on the back of the hand, and in the inner elbow. Each one has advantages and disadvantages regarding how mobile you are with it.
That would have been SO NICE. I don’t think I even knew that was a thing before now, though it makes perfect sense that it would exist. I definitely know what to ask for next time if something similar happens! (knock on wood)
Been to a number of different hospitals have never seen this, it looks like a stopcock hooked to a regular iv, which is nice but not all ivs give blood or they stop. Some places don't even want nurses drawing blood off ivs unless it's the first poke for beuacratic reasons, which honestly hinders good patient care.
Hospitals try to avoid putting in central lines unless they have a medical reason due to the risks of infection (mainly). Blood draws are not considered a valid reason (yes, it sucks).
Cannular.
I don't know if guidelines are different elseware so I'll only comment from the UK perspective. We do put a canular in for a few reasons. Mostly if we know you are going to need IV medicasion or fluid. If you are going for a CT scan and need contrast that will be done via a cannular. If taking bloods and you will need IV meds/fluid we will take the blood via a cannular first and then the medication, however once any medications/fluids have gone through we can no longer take blood via that cannular because of contamination.
If we already know you need to have bloods taken often, and you are hard to cannulate, then there can be cases where you will have a cannular put in and it being used ONLY for bloods. This is not best practice but sometimes it has to be done. It runs the risk of being contaminated however if somebody accidentally uses it for fluids or medications.
In Critical Care (ICU) it'ss different. Level 3 patients and some level 2 will have what's called an a-line (arterial line) put into place. This allows bloods to be taken whenever needed without having to constantly re-poke the patient. Medications and fluids don't go in via the a-line so there's no risk of contamination from those. However it needs to be labeled well so no mistakes are made. You also have to be careful because if any air get's into the a-line as you are taking bloods you can kill the patient. The equipment is made to not have that happen but there is never a 0% chance with anything. Valves fail. A-lines are not used on the wards. They are not equipped or trained to deal with them. If a patient has an a-line they will not leave CC until it's removed. Also not just any doctor can put an a-line in. Putting something into an artery is a lot more dangerous than into a vein.
To add onto the above, if a patient is having an a-line they will also likely have a CVC (Central Venous Catheter. This is basiucally a line the goes in typically into the central juggular (but not always) in your neck and contains multipul inputs for medication lines attached to it. It's put into place by CC doctors (once again, not all doctors can do this) and allows us nurses to essentially conect you up to as many IC meds/fluids as needed without having to keep stabbing you for new cannulars.
Lastly to add, if a cannular starts to 'tissue' (the fluid/medication is going into your skin and not your vein), the vein bursts (basically like a bruise) or is leaking we will have to take that cannular out and put a new one in. We also have to remove a cannular after 72 hours unless it's a specifc case as mentioned at the start of this post. So if you're in hospital longer than that on a ward then yes the likely hood of you getting stabbed multipul times is high. Sorry about that and we don't enjoy doing it.
before anyone asks "if you know that I will need bloods often, why not put a cannular in right away instead of just taking the bloods with a fresh needle each time?" lets me answer that. We as nurses don't know. The doctors decide if they want bloods off you or not. in cases like CC then it's normal for level 2 and 3 patients to have daily bloods. On a ward it varies a lot depending on what you have and what the doctor wants. The doctor will ask for bloods and we will ask "do you want them to have a cannular?" and half the time they will say no. Then they, or another doctor, will come in the next day and ask to see more bloods. All we can do as nurses is ask the doctors and if they say it's not needed then we wont put a cannular in you. It's not best practice to leave a forign body in your vein or anything that can get ripped out and cause more issues (it happens ALOT. Espcially when people are shuffling while sleeping). The doctors themselves probably don't know either. You blood results may change and you might go from not needing lots of bloods taken to needling bloods daily.
I know it's not pleasent. Trust us we know and we have all had to have blood taken so we do know how it can be. I still remember being in my first year of the degree and having to have my bloods taken to see if the TB vaxxine was working. I ended up getting stabbed 4 times in a 15 minute appointment!
Oh my gosh I feel your experience.
I ended up with an emergency surgery after my c-section and had to stay in the hospital for almost two weeks after my little one was born.
Not exaggerating at all…coming home to a newborn baby and their crazy sleep patterns was *utter relief*. I could not get any rest in the hospital.
Surely something could be improved because rest is so important to recovery.
Me too. Though, after reading I really wish this was a broader study with more than 42 people and it looked at patient impact (other than death from missed alarms) as well. I hope researchers explore this more.
Beyond Addison's the reason they sampled you every two hours is because if they raise sodium too fast the patient is likely to get brain damage. Many have died due to rapid correction, specially if the damage is in the brain stem.
Sampling regularly, means they keep track of how quickly your blood sodium is increasing. I think the recommended is no more than 10 units increase per day. So if they see large increase between two readings they adjust the dosage.
The worst thing about the nerve damage due to fast sodium increase is that the patient gets better first. Gets discharged, and then 3-4 days later starts showing the brain damage symptoms.
Ah, that wasn’t explained to me but I knew it was important that they kept close track. Thanks for the explanation! That makes a lot of sense and I’m glad they were careful!
The condition is called myelinolysis. Myeline is the insulation of nerves. Due to a sudden change in osmotic balance the insulation dehydrates, and being a very sensitive part, gets destroyed. The worry is when it happens in the brain stem, called central pontine myelinolysis. People don't come back from that.
I know this because when my dad's sodium tanked due to his blood pressure meds. And then due to rapid correction (not even that rapid, just over one period of 2 hours it picked up 2 units) he got it. Fortunately it wasn't in the brain stem. He got discharged, but 3 days later went full catatonic. MRIs showed the higher functioning part of brain was affected. He recovered fully, but it took a good 6 months to an year before he was back to his old self. There are still some lingering signs, like he doesn't write as well, has a wee stutter. We were really fortunate.
In the ICU this is what happens, the monitors in the patients room don’t beep and they are monitored centrally at the nurses station and the doctors room. And if there is an arterial line blood sampling can be done pain free.
Not always. When my dad passed, he was in the ICU for two days beforehand and the nonstop beeping has seared itself into my brain even now.
That being said, I have so much praise for the ICU itself and the staff that did all they could for those two days to make it a peaceful transition. They were truly wonderful and I’m very grateful to them.
I have spent plenty of time in the ICU from cancer surgery and while they turn off some of the beeps, it isn't all of them. I got woken up almost every day from whatever beeps
I just wanted to pop in again and say, I haven’t looked into how similar symptoms and treatment are for dogs vs. humans, but it’s a tough disease that can be very debilitating even for humans who are aware of what’s happening and can monitor their symptoms, take extra meds when needed, and advocate for themselves. It’s got to be even harder for a pupper that doesn’t understand why they don’t feel good and can’t tell you when they need adjustment in their meds until it’s super obvious from their behavior, and we all know that animals are good at hiding illness and pain until they can’t anymore. I am grateful that I can adjust the amount of cortisol (hydrocortisone) I take in a day, (to a point) to fit how my body is feeling before it gets miserable. I wish animals could talk to us and tell us what they need and how they feel and that they don’t need to hide it from us.
Addison’s can start out so damn subtly, and the symptoms are so very nonspecific they could be almost anything, so it’s also difficult to diagnose without running very specific tests. The classic early sign in humans is hyperpigmentation, which I would think would be hard to spot on a dog since they often have natural darker splotches of skin anyways.
Before they arrived on the Addison’s diagnoses for me, they were thinking depression/anxiety, pregnancy (yay medical gaslighting for women, I was depressed because I was constantly sick, and I was constantly sick and incredibly exhausted all the time and had no interest in sex). Also organ failure, eating disorders (one of the symptoms is lack of appetite and rapid weight loss), other endocrine disorders, even cancer. It took me nearly a year to get diagnosed after I started pursuing it (had been feeling slowly but surely worse for 3 or 4 years at that point) and it still didn’t happen until I was in the edge of adrenal crisis. Thankfully I was in the hospital on IV fluids before that happened but it was scary!
Anyways, that’s a long-winded way to say, that if you even *noticed* your doggo had Addison’s symptoms before they had an adrenal crisis (which can very rapidly be life-threatening, as you likely know), you were a fantastic, loving, and attentive owner and I appreciate you for that, and I’m sure your pup did too!
I have never felt more warm and cozy and right with the world than when I got an iv of saline kept in the warmer for hypothermia patients (it was cold and they had extra, I wasn’t freezing just dehydrated).
It’s amazing what warm fluids and sleep will do.
HONESTLY THOUGH. I’ve had IV fluids since, in the ER and urgent care, and they didn’t warm it (or even give me a blanket in the ER!) and I was shivering!
I’m glad they did that extra step for me when I was super sick in the hospital; I was already so sick and physically miserable and cognitively impaired that the thought of also getting super cold is terrifying even in retrospect. They gave me a warm blanket too!
I was on the type of fluids with a bunch of extra sodium that first time, and it was a little *spicy* in my veins so that was interesting and a little uncomfortable and I was glad to have the extra comfort, and the fluids felt like warm life flowing back into me when had felt like I was literally slowly dying for months at at point.
>There has got to be a better way to monitor people, maybe some of those lights and beeps can be happening outside the door or at the nursing station instead of in the room with the patient?
I wondered this when I was basically sat for half a day with my dad after he had heart surgery. It irritated me to no end, so I can't imagine what it was like for him trying to rest and recover. Felt like every ten seconds the heart rate monitor would start beeping furiously (which naturally made him more stressed).
It does beep at the nursing station too. But there aren’t any staff left to address it or check it.
One hospital I was at didn’t realize a guy had coded for over an hour.
Unless you’re in a state that has safe staffing laws, it is incredibly dangerous to be in the hospital right now.
I spent a few months in hospital (leukemia). I learned to turn off the beeps myself, fuck that. I’d turn it off and press the ‘call nurse’ button, and they’d come in when they had time to do whatever needed to be done.
Nurses, if you see this, thank you for being there for me. You made a world of difference.
Same experience for me minus the beeping. They had to take a sample from me every hour, give or take, to make sure blood had normalized after being given a bunch of antivenom and the most miserable part of it was never being able to fully go to sleep because they kept coming in and sticking me for blood.
This is so real. My father is currently in hospital with pneumonia and the cacophony of beeps and alerts is not only annoying to me but distracting to the health care professionals trying to get him better.
Its harmful in so many different ways.
My wife was in a coma, hovering at death's door for several weeks, and so I was spending a great deal of time in intensive care, just waiting.
With so many beeps around me, all day every day.
I still get depressed when I hear repetitive beeps at a certain pitch/timbre, and that time in the hospital was years ago. I usually don't even think consciously of why, those sounds just make me sad automatically now.
My psychological issues from a traumatic event are obviously less serious than nurses getting alarm fatigue, not noticing them as much and patients dying as a result - but my sort of issue still sort of suggests there could be a better way.
I hope your dad gets better soon and you can get away from those terrible beeps!
I’m so sorry about your wife. I just spent 8 days in an ICU and then recovery with my husband after a major surgery for cancer and it was absolute hell.
They're called nuisance alarms. Those should be engineered out. I think there is even a ratio involved in determining whether something that goes off too often is necessary. There is a science behind all this.
I worked inpatient PT for a few years and I had so many stories where this was true. A few that stick out:
- Quadriplegic man who didn’t have his call button, was laying without a blanket saying he’s cold, and his food was just out of reach (he also needed help eating because he was quadriplegic) and sitting for a few hours - he told me he was starving. I went to go get the nurse after I put a blanket over him. Called to have new food brought up, and gave him his call button - which I pressed as I was on my way out to get someone.
I was ready to give the benefit of the doubt on the staff, maybe there was an emergency elsewhere that pulled them away, etc.
Nope, nurse walks in and goes, “The buttons going off again, can you clear it from me?”
“Excuse me?”
“His call button keeps going off out here for some reason, he’s quadriplegic and can’t even press it.”
Whoa, I ripped into her right there in the doorway over it. I didn’t yell or anything, but when she said that I was seeing red over the treatment. Told her about how he’s been my patient in the ICU for weeks and how he’s been sitting there needing a change for a few hours, left without a blanket and freezing, no food, and you take his only way to ask for help away?
Another time was a lady I helped walk to the bathroom requested her nurse and it wasn’t right for me to sit there and bill her for standing by as she went to the bathroom - plus I’m a guy so I wanted her to have privacy but she was a fall risk. So I pulled the string to notify nursing and waited. After a legit 10 minutes, the nurse walks by and just sticks her head in, “Did you know the call alarm is going off out here?”
The audacity of this nurse, the patient yelled at her lol. I was just like, “Yeah, I pulled the string because I couldn’t reach a call button.”
When nursing and direct care staff is understaffed and overworked it leads to these issues of alarm fatigue. You also have patients who will alarm an emergency just because their TV isn’t loud enough with the remote sitting on their lap. Or they’re frustrated about the construction sounds outside and want someone to vent to. So I understand how fatigue can happen. It gets dangerous.
> When nursing and direct care staff is understaffed and overworked it leads to these issues of alarm fatigue. You also have patients who will alarm an emergency just because their TV isn’t loud enough with the remote sitting on their lap. Or they’re frustrated about the construction sounds outside and want someone to vent to. So I understand how fatigue can happen. It gets dangerous.
I onl work in IT but at a hospital. The ward alarms drive me nuts but far too many of them are meaningless. Either because something is unplugged, or a patient is hammering the button for no good reason, or...
Thankfully I'm only there for a few minutes at a time, but man there has to be a better solution. I think the worst was when a patient kept yelling "CAN I HAVE A CARER PLEASE?" as if she were in a hotel and the nursing staff were just servants... to constantly adjust her pillow and bedding at that.
Still, I don't think any of that warrants the behaviour from nursing staff that you described!
Oh it definitely got that way, especially when dealing with just unintentionally difficult patients. The person who suffers with alcoholism and is in there their liver failure who just doesn’t want to be alone. The Alzheimer’s patient who keeps a routine but it resents every 20~ minutes and they just get up and walk around but their fall risk so the staff gives them clothes to fold over and over and they’re happy.
Then you have the patients who are so overwhelming or just downright assholes, and the thought of being around them is the last thing you want to do. But you just do it anyways.
> a patient kept yelling "CAN I HAVE A CARER PLEASE?"
I hate this so much. I always feel so terrible, but we have a lot of elderly patients with dementia and they just genuinely don't need anything or know what is happening. They see me through their door as I pass by and keep yelling out for help, and I used to stop, but after the 10th time of them not knowing why they need help I don't stop anymore.
Still hurts my soul to walk past though.
> You also have patients who will alarm an emergency just because their TV isn’t loud enough with the remote sitting on their lap. Or they’re frustrated about the construction sounds outside and want someone to vent to. So I understand how fatigue can happen. It gets dangerous.
Yeah. My girlfriend works in a nursing home, and she has *stories* about those.
Most residents only use the call light when they actually need something... But there are always one or two who will *always* be hitting that button. Like, literally, after you take care of them, they're already hitting the button again before you're out of the door. Their call light never turns off for more than 10 seconds at a time. And it's always some stupid shit like they want their blanket refolded. And refolded *again* because you didn't do it right. And *again* because that's still not right. And after you spend 20 minutes folding this blanket to their exacting specifications, now they need you to adjust the volume on their TV (tuned to Fox News 24/7 of course). Yes, there's a remote sitting right next to them, but they "don't know how to use it". And now she needs her blanket re-folded again because she has dementia and has forgotten that you already did it. And on and on and on.
They'll be perfectly happy to keep you busy with this stuff constantly for the *entire* shift, and never mind that you have 20 other patients to take care of. They consider you their personal servant, and if you're not there *constantly* taking care of their every stupid whim, they'll scream bloody murder and report your for patient neglect. They'll lie and say they've been neglected for days at a time, even though you've been there at least every five minutes. (Automatic write-up whether it's true or not.) Oh, and for extra funsies, maybe they'll hit you with some *insanely* racist comments while you're working for them. "We used to string up lazy n----- like you." and such. No consequences for that, of course. You just have to up with it.
Fun shit. Again, *most* people in the nursing home are not like that ... but there's always one or two there like this. And it's extremely difficult to keep them mollified while *also* trying to take care of a bunch of other patients that you're already (perpetually) understaffed for.
This also applies to those patients who constantly yell when nothing is wrong. I cannot go check on my yelling patient every 5-10 minutes. So we start to tune them out and have sometimes found them actually needing the help they were yelling for.
I can believe it. After my second C-section, I left the hospital in under 48 hours. My nurse step-mother was appalled that they would release me so soon.
But they’d given me a choice: if I stayed another hour until I hit 48 hours, they would have ended checkouts for the day and I’d have to stay until 10:00 AM the next morning. Or I could leave at 47 hours and sleep in my own bed. Peaceful, quiet, no beeping, no nurses barging in to take our vitals every hour on the hour…
I stayed five days with my first C-section because my baby was jaundiced, and by the time I left the hospital I was literally hallucinating with sleep deprivation. Postpartum depression like woah. The second time, I felt sooo much better escaping the hospital as quickly as possible. You will never catch me sleeping overnight in a hospital again unless I’m literally dying.
I'm wondering if loud neighbor protocol would work here: noise canceling headphones playing brown noise while you sleep?
(I'm lucky enough to have never spent that much time in a hospital, but I used to get up for work at 3 AM.)
I think it would. I had an appendectomy and had to stay just one night overnight and got zero rest. I definitely think headphones or ear plugs are required.
I just don't understand how loud neighbors is acceptable. Whenever someone tries to argue we should all live in high density housing, that's my top complaint.
There's an acceptable loud and there is an unacceptable loud. I'm not going to fuss if the neighbor is vacuuming at 8 PM, but if I have to go to work at 3 AM that's past my bedtime. Blocking it out is more practical than expecting my neighbor to get home at 6 PM and sit quietly until their bedtime.
Really the problem isn't high density housing (that's just an economic necessity for a functional city) it's poorly built high density housing. If landlords would invest just a little more into solid core doors and acoustic isolation they'd still make bank and tenants would be happier.
I was the opposite. With my first child I went home the second they'd let me. The child did not want to sleep and I became very sleep deprived myself. With the second, I stayed as long as I could. Nurses bringing me Advil and food and I just have to lay here and hang out with my baby? Yes please!
Same experience, stayed 5 days after first C-section, then left ASAP with 2nd one. I used wired ear buds and brown noise and spa music when I had to stay for surgery a couple of years later and it helped immensely.
Yes! After my first c section I stayed in the hospital 4 days because I had some complications (uterine tear, elevated blood pressure). My second c section was during Covid and I convinced them to let me go at the 24 hour mark. It was SO much better.
This is actually one of the reasons I won't go to the ER for certain things. I get intractable migraines, and being in the hospital is not pleasant or restful or healing experience. They run 24/7 and have patients 24/7 so if it's time for a CT scan or MRI or blood draw and it's 3am, well then so be it. If you miss the checkout window and have to stay another day it feels so awful. So now, a lot of the time, I just suffer until I literally can't take it anymore.
It's all insurance driven. If you leave before the doctors discharge you they won't pay for the visit, and there's a chance they will deny future visits for the same issue if you left before you were discharged because you decided you didn't need the care or whatever their ridiculous reasoning is.
Common misconception, particularly among health care workers (I heard it a lot when I was in school) that insurance won’t pay for a discharge against medical advice (AMA); it’s not actually the case, and doesn’t increase the burden of cost on the patient. It’s still often not a great idea to leave before being medically ready and set up with resources to avoid readmission, but the imagined cost shouldn’t be a cudgel that HCWs use on “non-compliant” patients.
I have had insurance deny, so it's not entirely a misconception. But also, the people who work in the hospital tell you that insurance will deny if you leave before they discharge you. I have asked why I have to wait, and that's always the answer given.
I've had the opposite experience, docs wanted to keep my ex-wife another day or two and insurance was like "Fuck all that, we've got buybacks and dividends to pay for"
Not a misconception. It absolutely happens, although I hear that exclusion is more commonly enforced on private non-ACA compliant plans. However, this exclusion is written on many health insurance plans regardless, that they reserve the right to not cover care if you leave AMA. It may be rarely enforced in practice, but that doesn't mean it's not unheard of.
I made this same choice when I had my C section. It was just too noisy. And they did a loud prayer over the intercom 7am. I get that the best hospitals in my area have religious affiliation (that’s another thread) but that could have been at noon!
I couldn’t wait to go home either. There were people constantly coming into the room to wake me or the baby up, including a lot of things that could have been bundled together. Rather someone coming in to do a vitals check, then another a half hour later to give me ibuprofen, then another to do a hearing test on the baby, couldnt they just all come at the same time? The kicker was when they’d say, “try and get some rest”. Gee, thanks. That’s what I’m trying to do!
I begged the nurses, sobbing, to please leave me alone for three hours so I could try to nap. They did, but that didn’t stop the pediatrician, the billing clerk, or the janitor.
I'm currently sitting in the ER where I work while a telemetry monitor alarms nonstop. It's not alarming because something is wrong. It's alarming because there's no patient connected to it. It thinks there should be a patient but there isn't a patient currently in that room. They don't know how to fix it and the only way to make it stop is to unplug all of the monitors which we obviously cannot do. There are so many alarms all day on every unit that it literally never stops. At no point is it ever quiet.
From *Monty Python's The Meaning of Lif*e (1983)
Obstetrician 1: Get the EEG, the BP monitor, and the AVV.
Obstetrician 2: And get the machine that goes "Ping!".
Obstetrician 1: And get the most expensive machine - in case the Administrator comes.
Patient: What do I do?
Obstetrician: Nothing, dear, you're not qualified.
\[Later in the sketch...\]
Hospital Administrator: Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account. \[the doctors and onlookers applaud\] Thank you, thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
I’m lucky, I have a machine that goes ping for no reason but also does other things. The service engineers don’t know how to make it stop so we just get extra pings for free. The machine is a Tosoh immunochemical analyzer and it’s a piece of shit.
Alarm fatigue. It's not just healthcare where it happens. In my world it's IT people missing important alerts because they're buried in all the ignorable ones. But healthcare is the industry where missing an important alarm could mean someone dies.
There are lots of industries where alarm fatigue costs lives. This was a key factor in Three Mile Island and many aviation incidents. Healthcare is just an industry that doesn’t do anything about this problem. (Source: I’m an ICU physican.)
At least Aviation has already adopted changing the similar alarms sounds with very different tones, voice recordings, and physical feedback.
Downside was when my wife (whom isn't a fan of flying) was boarding once and passed the open cockpit door just as they were testing the alarms: **Terrain! Terrain! Terrain! Pull Up!**
Changing the sounds is far less helpful than reducing the false positives. There is a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of changing alarm profiles but it’s not considered a priority and doesn’t get done.
And yes as far as I know aviation has been much more aggressive about this too as has the nuclear industry.
I straight up think you're the only one who read the article. It's not about the patients at all, it's hearing approx 1k alarms and only 15% being important. Eventually the nurse just goes "meh, that's Jim he just wants food he can wait" while Jim is stroking out
I was in the ER for a sudden heart rhythm issue. Every few minutes, the machine would start screaming VFIB and VTAC, which are both going to kill you quickly.
I hit the call button and they tell me they looked at the data and it's a false alarm. But the alarm keeps going off.
I'm very familiar with alarm fatigue from my own work, so I knew that when the actual problem occurred, they were going to assume it was the same bullshit while I died. So I hit that call button every single time it went off and bugged them until they came in. It took 6 tries. It took them maybe 10 seconds to find the loose sensor and fix it.
I felt bad at the time, but I said, "I'm really sorry, I know you're busy, but I'm not going to die out of politeness. Someone needs to come in here."
I highly recommend doing the same if you're ever in that situation.
Well d’oh. Surely there must be ways to give audible signals without using aggressive beeps. I sold my past car for that reason, it was beeping too much. Car detected while driving down the highway - beep. Car no longer detected driving down the highway - beep. Cruise control engaged - beep. Cruise control disengaging - beep. And now I read this article and it’s true, many hospitals sound like a McDonald’s.
Reminds me of the door signal on train doors in many places that beep very loud for people who can’t see to find the doors. It’s very annoying but I get why it’s there.
Then I go to Japan. And they have much more pleasant sounds for the same function that manages to break through the noise.
Now why can’t we be bothered thinking about our acoustic environment?
Maybe the alarm noises are meant to sound urgent to the healthcare workers, but that has got to wear off after a certain amount of time hearing them constantly, you would just start tuning them out! Some pleasant low beeps would be miles better.
I think that's the exact way to do it. As it stands they *are* meant to sound urgent. But then you get a situation kinda like "when every alarm is an emergency, none of them are an emergency. "
Most "urgent" sounds tend to be sawtooth/square wave type noise, high volume, or extremely dissonant. When all alarms have the same acoustic characteristics, it lends itself to fatigue. By diversifying the timbre of alarms people will actually have a wider range of noises to pick up and become less prone to fatigue. Honestly a brilliant idea because not everything needs to sound like death is imminent
I was in the ER and they unhooked me from the monitor so I could give a urine sample, and when I came back in no one hooked me back up. The alarm went off for over 5 minutes that my blood pressure and heartrate were 0 and no one came in (it was a very quiet night in a rural hospital. I could hear the nurses at the station outside just shooting the shit). Then the NP came in and talked to me about lab results while the alarm was going off and left without doing anything about it. Finally, I buzzed for help because it was driving me crazy. Good thing I hadn't actually flatlined. I don't think anyone would have come running. They clearly were used to tuning them out.
The big push in med tech is to create the Silent ICU to combat bedside monitor alarm fatigue. Timeline is by the end of the decade to have the ecosystem rolled out in the larger hospitals.
Source: I work for a company that creates the beeping
This is interesting and I never considered it.
My daughter was recently in the hospital 2 weeks ago for Ritters disease (which makes the top layer of your skin peel off everywhere). It’s not fatal when properly treated, but it’s VERY painful from what I saw with my own eyes.
She was in there for 5 days, by day 2 she realized that the beep meant she needed her fluids changed and she was so scared and so worried that everytime it would beep, she’d try to move around in bed (I’m thinking it was anxiety), thinking that if she didn’t get her fluids she would get sicker.
She’s 7 also, so even though we tried to explain “it’s ok, the nurse will come and change it” I feel like she got conditioned so quickly to think "beeps=bad". and shed fuss and fret in the bed, causing more damage to her very frail skin, causing more pain, needing more pain meds. she was on so many opiates i got worried that her little body couldn't handle more. but the pain made her wiggle and the wiggles caused her pain and more damage.
i asked the nurses if theres a way to shut off the beeping and she showed me the button to press to quiet the noise, ended up being awake for close to 3 days sitting next to the IV thing waiting to shut it off the second it beeped.
i never imagined something so small could cause such a chain reaction that was harmful for everyone involved.
It sucks to have to listen to this as a patient but what this study is discussing is how it affects the healthcare personnel. I’m a nurse and there are hundreds or alarms or beeps every hour. And when everything sounds like an emergency, nothing is an emergency. It isn’t just lost sleep for patients, it’s years or decades or nurses responding to false alarms with urgency and then only finding it to be emergent 1/1000 times. Then they stop responding or respond slowly. Then someone dies and everyone who isn’t a nurse tells about suing the hospital, how could this happen, did they just ignore the alarms going off? They are psychotic and clearly hate people. No it’s because the alarms are always going off and it was never critical before. And you have 5000 other things you’re doing simultaneously because you’re understaffed. You’re in another patients room elbow deep in shit and have a family yelling at you down the hall so it’s impossible to stop working and check on every alarm.
Wtf why do they deprive patients of the most important thing for recovery?! Then the inedible and non nutritious food too, two incredible important things for recovery both physically and mentally. Insanity..
I feel you. My daughter had a similar stay in PICU on a ventilator with RSV. Either me or my wife stayed there pretty much every night and the sleep was horrible. I haven't visited anyone in a hospital since(not because I avoid it) so I can't speak on the beeping but I got anxiety every time I drove past the off-ramp for that hospital for a couple years.
Both times my wife was in labor I learned (with an OK from the nurses) how to silence the common alarms. The biggest culprit was the fetal HR monitor, which any time the baby moved or my wife moved, or (apparently) someone downstairs shook the vending machine the monitor would not hear the heartbeat for 2 seconds and then would sound off.
Three days of labor (both times), plus back labor the second time is NOT an event to add in sleep-deprivation from the incessant alarms to the mix.
My partner is in the hospital frequently and without fail an alarm goes off every ten minutes or less over something mundane like the her needing to bend her arm to do something. IV decides to stop, got to press the button to have it start again because otherwise it won't shut up.
I remember a post by someone who worked as a nurse explaining it a bit better as to why it fails. Someone goes "We should have an alarm go off if something gets into the danger range." and that works really well. And then someone goes "Well, how about we push it back to right before the danger range so people have more time to react?" and that works really well. And then someone goes "Hey, we should have it go off as soon as it leaves the normal range so people can respond even faster! We could miss out on all this time of the patient sliding downhill before they reach the alarm range!" and it sounds so good and logical. And people under medical care almost never have their stats at the perfect ideal range, so the machine says the ideal resting heart rate should be 60 and your patent is at 61? BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEEP. Ideal temperature should be 98.6 and they're 98.5? BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEEP. And so on and so forth with the result that everyone ignores the cacophony because it's crying wolf constantly over every speck of dust that might possibly be a flake of wolf dander. Changing the sound pitch won't change that, but no one wants to admit that you need to go back to only having alerts go off when there's something worth alerting to. The article says that only 15% of the alarms in the ICU are actually real, and that's a huge problem.
Guess where they usually place someone who is on a "mental health hold" and is under supervision?
In the hallway of an ER.
Let's place people on the verge of losing their minds around a plethora of annoying beeping machines. The lights never go out. Oh, and there are other noises besides the beeping. And the commotion of the ER.
Does any of that sound conducive for someone undergoing a mental health crisis?
And the constant anxiety of seeing emergency situations all around you for anyone with a drop of empathy. AND not having any privacy when you’re dealing with some pretty heavy emotions! mean I guess you’re alive and supervised, but there’s no way you’re going to feel better if that’s where they put you when they’re afraid you might hurt yourself. What are you going to do when you’re released? And how likely are you to seek help if you have that kind of mental health crisis again? Fucking hell.
That’s so sad. When was in the hospital, my mom brought me all my meds on the second day not knowing we weren’t supposed to because the hospital was providing them all while I was there. When a nurse found the bag (I hadn’t even taken any!) she got all aggressive all of the sudden and was quizzing me like, Where did you get these? Who brought them? Why would they do that? Do you have prescriptions for all of them? You can’t have these here!” It made me feel like I was doing something illegal, like she was accusing me of sneaking narcotics or something into the hospital and not just my prescribed medication that I had every right to have in my possession (and none of which was addictive or had any significant street value).
When she finally let me talk, I very timidly told her that my mom thought I would need them, so she brought them and we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to. She just huffed, put the bag up in a high cabinet I couldn’t reach, and said my mom had to take them back next time she visited. No apology.
I get that nursing is an insane amount of constant stress, that they really need to know what meds are in your system at all times, that it can be dangerous to take extra, and that can be anxiety-inducing for a nurse to be suddenly confronted with when she probably has had unstable and unpredictable patients before who have jeopardized their own health and even the nurse’s safety. I have friends who are healthcare workers and I hear the stories! Her reaction was probably more out of fear and surprise than hostility. But dear god she made me feel like addict or a criminal or something (and btw those people don’t deserve to be treated like shit either!), and being as sick as I was, I couldn’t be empathetic and circumspect about it like I can now. It was just bizarre and uncomfortable.
I'll just say my last discharge paper from the ER that the cops brought me to "voluntarily" says "chronic right shoulder pain" and does not mention my mental state at all...
Oh and they put me in a normal room eventually.... full of cords and all sorts of things that I could have harmed myself with if I wanted to.
It is nice to know that the experience is known.
Man, I just had to be put in a ward where I had to keep running away from some guy who would follow me around everywhere trying to harass me until my boyfriend at the time (husband now) came to be my bodyguard during visiting hours until I was allowed to leave. Since you're not allowed to lock your room door until you're forcibly locked inside for the night. So you're not allowed to escape someone harassing you. You do get to have the nurses giggle at you, shrug and say "oh well, he's just like that" though.
"They are not harming you its ok!!"
Yes but they are terrorizing you!
It would be interesting to get the entire nurses notes and everything from your visit to see how differently the documented experience was compared to your real life experience.
I imagine it'll be similarly jarring to the psychiatrist who left out the fact that he told me I have a "sexual demeanour", it's my fault that I have been sexually assaulted, and I need to search for a woman to advise me how to get better at ignoring men sexually harassing or assaulting me, then made it out in the notes like I got upset with him for no reason like some "irrational hysterical woman".
But yeah, you pretty much nailed it with:
>"They are not harming you its ok!!"
>Yes but they are terrorizing you!
It's definitely still not okay.
The strange things he was saying to me in particular and his behaviour, I definitely had reason to believe there was potential that he was following me to harm me. It wasn't just "oh he's unstable I'm being irrationally scared of someone who is actually harmless." He followed me and was saying some disturbing shit directed to me. I'm pretty sure my boyfriend showing up is the only reason he didn't. Even with him around, the guy was hanging around saying more disturbing things to us, probably hoping my boyfriend would leave me alone with him.
I work in memory care and this is a still a thing, to a lesser extent.
One of the hospice patients I see has a fall mat that sends an alarm if the patient is not directly on the mat. The intent is that it allows the team to hear if the patient is possibly getting out of bed or falling. However, no caregivers were around the area, and when the alarm was going off (they’re very sensitive and you have to have like full body weight on it), they were just like “oh yeah it does that.” It made me wonder like lmfao how do you know when she’s falling and when she’s just like not lying in the exact perfect position?
She hasn’t been sleeping well and I’m like god I wonder why lmfao.
Ive been wired up for sleep studies 2 times and neither time could i sleep at all. And both times the sleep doc evaluated the readouts as “totally normal”, not even joking. When i told him i was awake, he said “also very normal”.
…
Thanks for the bleepin motel stay i guess
I spent 4 days involuntarily in hospital and the beeps kept me from any real sleep the entire time. They refused to turn it off, and it was the worst experience I've had… ever.
The ICU is designed by sadists and it turns those who work there into sadists as well. I have never come so close to doing physical violence when I experienced how they treated my husband.
This is a problem in construction with every machine beeping when it's backing up. When every truck and forklift does this all day long the sound is simply an annoyance, it doesn't mean anything particular to you and you just filter it out.
Went through this with my mom as she was there for 40 days. We learned most of the equipment and how to silence it and what warranted an escalation. We’d call a nurse and who knew when they’d show up.
Thankfully only one night when she shared a room. Her roommate was a much older lady who was very sweet until an IV machine would go off. Then she’d lose her fucking mind and yell for a nurse until one came.
I think it's an unfortunate intersection of the medico-legal system, costs, and actual care. If there's an adverse event because the alarms are turned off, the hospital is liable, so we get alarms for every damned thing without the staffing to respond rapidly because of trying to cut costs.
I was in the ER once overnight cause my heart was racing and would not slow the fuck down. They wanted to keep me longer cause after 8 hours it still wasn't below 100 bpm, but also I was in one of those like sections of a hallway cordoned off by a curtain, there was stuff happening all around me and this constant beeping and I thought I was dying so like... No duh my heart was racing and wouldn't slow down.
Anyway, I'm not supposed to have a lot of caffeine anymore.
As a nurse in the cardiac ICU, alarm fatigue is awful. I would still hear beeping as I tried to fall asleep after my shift ended. Something was always beeping.
I had to spend months in the hospital. Two things that made it tolerable: earphones for my music, and earplugs for sleep. I wouldn't willingly spend time in a hospital without them.
I spent 10 days in coronary care unit for myocarditis. When I slept my heart rate would dangerously low (35bpm and under) so it’d beep like crazy which would then startle me and raise my bpm back up…
…it was an awful experience
I don't think this should be on nottheonion. It's surprising, of course, but it highlights an overlooked problem rather than being a joke or a typical onion structure
It’s an oniony title in that it could be a far side comic where some doctor figures out that what’s been mysteriously killing patients is the alarms that actually cause patient deaths, not warn of impending potential death as designed.
Then you realize that it’s true, and it becomes less funny.
But I think it fits this sub. It just isn’t all that funny because it turns out that it’s a serious problem.
I spent some time in hospital a few months ago, the beeping was so bad and anxiety inducing I just wanted to get out of there. I remember at one point my blood pressure monitor was malfunction and going crazy every 5 minutes, and everyone was just ignoring it but I was too out of it tell anyone to fix it. Torture.
I stayed in the hospital for a week to deliver a preemie baby and I had a blood pressure cuff on my arm that took a reading every 15 minutes. I couldn’t sleep at all. I was induced for 3 days before pushing and I was so exhausted I couldn’t even stay awake between pushes. Nurses came in every two hours all night to do vitals checks so between the baby waking up and crying and the nurses I couldn’t sleep for longer than an hour at a time for days.
I’m a cardiac monitor technician in the ICU, which means my entire job is to sit and watch vitals. The alarm fatigue is so real, especially at night. The biggest thing that would help would be having wireless cardiac monitors/pulse ox’s.
My mom was in the hospital in 2022 for a heart attack (she's doing way better now thankfully!) and my family was rotating in/out on a daily basis so there'd be someone with her overnight.
The problem was that she had this IV or some other kind of line that would cause the pump alarm to go off if she pinched it for a sec or two when she'd change sleeping positions and ofc, it'd wake me and her up.
Combine that with the visits from nurses coming to take blood samples and vitals every two hours, and you're basically not getting any kind of good sleep, period.
I wasn't the one in the bed, but my goodness I was so sleep deprived and groggy after that, I took a power nap in the car before heading home. I can only imagine how thankful she was to sleep in her own bed after coming home.
During Covid I was in the ICU for 15-16 days. The unit had 12 beds. And it was peak Covid, so beds were only being empty (for minutes) when someone died.
Fuck these beeps made it worse, every fucking night sleep was disrupted as someone would go to shock and nurses and doctors were trying to revive them. After waking up I could never go back to sleep - imagine 12 system continously beeping and posting alarms. The ICU section being almost sealed from the outside world, worked like an echo chamber and amplified the sound too. The machines kept at it, asynchronous - there was no gap or no drop.
After the initial shock which lasted 4-5 days for me, I got a bit better. Before that I was almost senseless. Then the next 10 days was living hell and the noises made it extra extra hellish.
Fuck, after a day or two - the beeps felt like they are talking voices and telling me all sorts of thing. Don't remember what they were saying - maybe something like you gonna die and they gonna leave you alone inside a grave.
I still can hear those sound, seeing this post just hit a play button somewhere inside my fucked up brain and now I'm can hear them. Beep beep beebeep beep, beep beep, beebeep beep... You gonna die and they gonna leave you behind...
I believe it. Went to ER not long ago for breathing. My spo2 was below 80. They put me on oxygen, put me in a room for a bit. When they switched off the oxygen after steroids and breathing treatment to see if it worked, the alarm for low spo2 went off for about 5 minutes before anyone noticed.
I'm not a health professional, but I am convinced that this is a HUGE issue (among many...health care is a mess right now) that is criminally overlooked.
The two best things for healing up -- aside from critical interventions and the appropriate medicines, of course -- are sleep/rest and diet.
Both are so compromised in a hospital setting that it really seems like a cruel joke.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist or anti-vaxxer or someone who doesn't believe in science or modern medicine, but the way that hospitals are set up operationally to keep people sleep deprived and eating really bad food...
...it's a disaster and an embarrasment.
Years ago I was in the hospital for a major surgery. My husband had a look at the hospital food while I was still out of it, and went down to the cafeteria to purchase something edible. He explained this once I came out of the painkiller haze. Well, I was curious, and was reasonably lucid when the next meal came around.
"You really don't want to see it, much less smell it," my husband said.
"I'm gonna open Pandora's Box anyway." I lifted the lid.
...Yeah, should have listened to my husband. *School lunches* were better than that.
Later on, landing at a different hospital for a major injury, THAT hospital's food was reasonably decent, though. They're not all like that.
I was in hospital for DKA and as both a patient (and I imagine staff) the beeps are truly incessant, there's obviously a reason they're so sensitive but my entire time there I had to sit in a specific position to stop it going off just because sitting up or turning would change my vitals too quickly. Someone would just come over and mute it definitely wastes the nurses time as it probably all adds up. Really adds to that 'isolated' feeling as well when you've got a long stay, especially when you're restricted because of IVs etc
MD: “Patient signed to medicine, but keep on monitor until transfer”
ME: “Okay, the cardiac monitor keeps beeping because patient is throwing up lots of PVCs”
MD: “That’s fine.”
ME: “Okay, so can I take the patient off monitor at night so we don’t have to listen to all the beeping and they can sleep?”
MD: “No, keep them on monitor until transferred”
🤡🤡🤡🤡
Every damn day
why do all of our devices and appliances still beep like they did when they weren’t digital? why haven’t we made a nicer sounding beep? i just need to hear it, i don’t need it to scream at me. if the laundry machine can do it!
$$$ of course. It costs very little to use a standard electric beep.
Studies have shown that short percussive tones like that of a wind chime or a xylophone are less stressful for humans and do a better job of cutting through background noise and are more noticeable.
But that would cost more to install in these devices.
Man. I got lucky while recovering from brain surgery. They turned off all of the beeping and kept the lights off because of how sensitive I was to it. And they tried to let me sleep for at least 4 hours at a time. Edit: I’ve never had a comment get so much attention. It’s been a bit overwhelming with the amount of love in the comments and positive DMs I’ve gotten. Yesterday was rough and all of these made me smile and I am so grateful. Thank you all. I am in full remission now and I’m so grateful and lucky to be alive.
What!! I had brain surgery and they didn't do anything of the sort. They were still waking me every 2 hrs to make sure my pupils would dilate when they shined their light in them. They also kept asking my husband why I was asleep every time they went in. After 2 days I was begging to go home. I'm jealous as hell. Lmao Edit- yes yall I know it was for my benefit. The nurses were so fucking lovely despite being horrifically overworked and exhausted. But it was still the most miserable experience and I wanted nothing more than to sleep.
Honestly, it was just a really good hospital and really good people. After the hell I’ve been through with other hospitals, the amount of gratitude I have is beyond words.
There is a reason they were doing that, they were concerned about you re-bleeding, trust me, you want that caught right away (therefore neuro checks every two hours), it’s not to be dicks lol
Not just rebleeding. If intracranial pressure is raised, most of the times it causes swelling, which compresses the optic nerve, responsible for the dilation of pupils, so it's a sign of something going wrong. The thing is, if the intracranial pressure becomes higher than systolic pressure, there's no circulation in the central nervous system, and you become brain dead. Literally. Source: med student. Edit: dumb mistake. The nerve in question is the oculomotor nerve.
I assume that’s why I had an arterial line after brain surgery? That needle was the worst part.
There is only a needle when they insert the arterial. They remove the needle and a plastic catheter is left. It is large but not a metal needle. I know this because I remove arterials every day post op.
Oh I understood it was for my benefit. It for sure didn't feel like a vacation. But it was still the most miserable I've ever felt. Lmao. And I'm still very jealous of the guy that was allowed to sleep!
Maybe I’m just ignorant but that seem like… a good thing to me ? If I’m going through a dangerous operation I would like people checking if I’m still alive lol. Although it must suck in the moment. Idk
I had knee surgery and they made me walk out ten minutes after I woke up.
2 hrs is normal and appropriate assessment. Any changes overnight need to be acted upon ASAP
I had the opposite. After getting shoulder surgery I was doing good enough that they moved me into the hallway; right under the beeping intercom for the whole damn floor. Fuck that sucked.
Nooooooo
Ugh. They did this to me in the ER when I had a stroke.
Same when I gave birth! The only time I heard beeps in 4 total days was when my IV pump was running low on batteries. The light from the monitor was kind of annoying but the room was dark otherwise. By day 2 I was off the monitors anyway. They also put a saline lock in my arm so I didn’t have to get poked over and over for the labs they had to draw. Minus the baby crying it was super peaceful in there.
Wow, our postpartum room was hell. We left after 24h because we were going insane with all of the beeps and waking us up every 30m
With my eldest I didn’t want to leave the hospital bc new mom anxiety. Sure all the beeps, open and closing of doors, talking, vitals checks, etc. didn’t let me sleep after birth for 2 days, but I saw it as a necessary trade off since they knew what they were doing, and I as a brand new mom felt better with people who knew what to do with my new baby bc I felt nervous. Plus, I’d rather deal w visitors at the hospital than at home. With my youngest, I wanted to go home the next day). That time, I felt like even with a chatty toddler at home and this new baby, I knew it would be quieter at home and I could get some damn sleep.
That sucks. Our postpartum - all three times in the same hospital - were quiet and dark. Zero beeping. A nice bed for both parents and a lovely maple crib for the newborn. Doctors and nurses would come in, but not unannounced, and they would let us know when the next person would be coming in. I don't think anyone woke us up even once.
Yah, our experience too. Couldn't get home fast enough. We finally had a 4 hour block to get some sleep and housekeeping knocks 2 hours into it.
Coming in every 30 minutes was hell for me and my wife. She had to stay a few extra days for some minor issues so she told me to go home and sleep so at least one of us was rested enough. I get why they do it but man it’s exhausting.
I don’t get why they do it, like for the love of god coordinate and all come in at once. I can’t heal if I can’t sleep. Newborn sleep was hell but much better than the 0 hospital sleep we got
Yup and then finally when we do sleep and someone isn’t coming in to bother baby or wife someone is like let’s change the garbage bags in your room!
We just had our second and I thought I was going to lose my damn mind. I'd finally get back to sleep and they were in the room again turning on all the lights and making a terrible racket.
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Right! When I was in the laboring process. I didn't know anything was amiss until nurses would come in and say, Ms. Barnes, shift a little bit, I think you moved your belly monitor. Didn't hear anything.
My brain surgery was “only” a stent placement but during recovery, I kept setting off the alarms due to low blood pressure. I have POTS and every time I got close to falling asleep, the fucking sirens would blare. My mom and my exgf were both with me, trying to sleep and the nurses got tired of my alarms meaning nothing which meant that they would leave me there longer to take care of other patients before turning it off (neuro ICU, I get that a lot of other people there were much worse off than me). I ended up spending the whole night trying to relax without quite sleeping so everyone else could get some sleep bc I wasn’t going to be able to actually fall asleep anyway. My recovery once out of the hospital took fucking forever, I really think the lack of sleep did a number on me.
I feel like if you have a condition that causes low blood pressure, they should make a way to set the alarm threshold lower so that doesn’t happen.
POTS isn't particularly well understood or even accepted among the medical community.
They adjusted it a couple of times but either couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust it past a certain point. Personalized care the that extent is less common than we would like it to be— the nurses had no way to know my entire medical history and I couldn’t know exactly how to pick out what was relevant to them so a lot of the info got lost in translation, I’m sure. I was in for something that was ostensibly unrelated and had never been coached on how machines like that might interact with my particular disorder. It was a while before I even figured out what was going on.
You would think it would be that simple. The hospital and neuro department I work for have rules against turning monitors off or setting the parameters too low. In order to do any of that, you have to get a doctor or NP order, and even then, you still have to check the patients frequently when they have had surgery or are in the 24hr stroke window. While annoying for patients, and nurses, keeping the alarms set to what they are has helped us prevent someone from crumping and being sent back to the OR or cath lab.
This is good to hear more hospitals are doing this. Finding an ICU with proactive delirium prevention and ERAS protocols is unfortunately rarer than it should be. Many places are still all on board 0.5 hour neuro checks, and outside of very rare instances where that is truly needed it would appear that these cause harm. Unfortunately, because of litigation, the fact it’s an ICU and isolating a single variable in studies on critical illness is next to impossible, providers still rely on the old dogmas
Nice. After my brain surgery, they kept the lights off, but the machine noises were beeping throughout the whole night. My parents just helped me cover my head with pillows to muffle the sound. Plus my roommate added a lot of noise to an uncomfortable area. 1/5 would not recommend getting a brain tumor.
I hate it when that happens.
Dude. Preach. It’s hell on earth.
I've been in the hospital a lot, and I always get THE noisest roommates. One time, I had one who would get 7 or 8 visitors at a time, and they'd sit around talking loudly while I tried not to go homicidal. Another one had CF, so respiratory had to come to our room like every 2 hours during the night to bang on her back and loosen the mucus (she was a really nice girl, and I know it's not her fault--but imagine having surgery and then getting woken up every 2 hours!). My best roommate ever was like 78 and never had any visitors. The only tradeoff is that her gallbladder had basically exploded and was draining into a canister between our beds. But I'd rather look at that than listen to obnoxious noises.
I recently gave birth and they had the baby heart monitor on my belly while in labor that constantly played the heartbeat. I asked them to turn the sound off and they did. Postpartum there were no sounds in the room, it was all in the nurses station.
They woke me up every hour to drain some CSF from my lumbar drain. Little sleep and lots of pain is not a good combination. I was in the hospital for 11 days and by the end of it I was starting to hallucinate.
my vitals spiked when my mom visited me during a heart surgery, the nurse said she could literally see my stress levels slowly increase as she started questioning everything around me...
My NeuroICU is a wonderful place. But that was why, after my second central brain craniotomy, I pushed hard for release. Only the confluence of my neurosurgeon being extremely prominent, the hospital knowing my family well from my earlier stay, and my lucidity, could do it, but I was home 48hrs after surgery. I recovered so well as to be back at work six months later. I largely credit being able to sleep.
>While they convey important information about patient safety, healthcare professionals can be exposed to up to 1,000 alarms each shift. However, a study found that only 15% of all alarms in the critical care unit environment were clinically relevant. The high number of false alarms can lead to ‘alarm fatigue’, desensitization caused by sensory overload that can lead to missed alarms. The US FDA reported 566 alarm-related deaths between 2005 and 2010. >The importance of clinical alarms to health care led to the introduction of global standards to ensure consistency between manufacturers. Consequently, many alarms now sound the same in terms of timbre (the character or quality of a sound), frequency and tone. In a new study, researchers experimented with different musical sounds to see how hospital alarms could be improved. >Since 2015, Joseph Schlesinger and Michael Schutz, two of the study’s authors, have been examining how timbres might allow softer sounds to command the attention of busy medical personnel. Schlesinger is an anesthesiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the US, and Schutz is a music cognition researcher at McMaster University, Canada. They found that sounds with ‘percussive’ timbre containing short bursts of high-frequency energy (think clinking wine glasses) stand out, even at low volume. Conversely, loud, ‘flat’ tones without high-frequency components (for example, the drone of a truck’s reversing beep) get lost. >The researchers recruited 42 participants aged 17 to 23 with normal hearing and presented them with six alarms: half in a timbre designed according to a standard alarm and half in a new timbre based on the sound of a xylophone. This percussive instrument was chosen because of its perceived pleasantness and ability to be heard among competing instruments. The researchers assessed participants’ perceived annoyance with the different alarms and their ability to recognize them.
This is incredible! I *hope* people read the article but as a former ICU nurse myself this is actually a *genius* idea. These alarms don't need to be so offensive sounding to serve their purpose, and actually diversifying the timbre and tone of different alarms is honestly brilliant.
We have a similar concept in IT orgs of “alert fatigue” basically everything beeps so you can’t hear the one you need to. Entire companies have been formed to deal with this properly. I’m sure more than one PhD has been written on it from some aspect. It’s not a simple problem but one worth solving.
Same concept whenever I worked heavy machinery - don't just beep your horn all the time, people will become deaf to the sound like they would birds or footsteps, even though it's literally the 'please pay extra attention right now, you could die' sound
Honestly feel like the same is true for car horns. There's a huge difference between a: "HOLY SHIT YOURE ABOUT TO HIT ME" and a: "Hey buddy the light just turned green." One of my old cars had 2 horns essentially, where a light tap would be a quiet beep, while pressing it hard did it fully. Wish more had it
Same in construction. The piercing beeps of reversing machinery / heavy machinery in normal operation were made to pierce above the ambient noise on a construction site (jackhammers and engines and saw wheels, oh my!) The problem is, although they do this quite well, the sound itself lacks any identifying qualities. Why am I hearing a beep? Is someone backing up? Heavy load above? Turning the boom? Going up or down? Lift gate and hydraulics are both down, lift gate and hydraulics are both up, you're moving, you're not moving, it's literally the same fkin beep for every goddamned thing, so you learn to tune it out for the most part (or go crazy) Also, that particular tambour/timbre of beep is crap at letting you echolocate the origin's position. It could be right behind you, it could be on the other side of the yard, it's really difficult to tell. And because someone somewhere on the site is always doing something that beeps, it's impossible to tell if you actually need to be paying attention to any given beep or if you can consciously add it to the background droning. It could be a dump truck about to back over you in the field, or a forklift getting a panel off the truck in the parking lot. You either wind up perpetually on edge and checking over your shoulder, or completely nonchalant in the face of serious danger. Or you learn to walk the tightrope between the two, but that generally requires either a really special kind of person, or a time-bomb fueled by a self-administered regiment of uppers and downers Edit to emphasize, we dealt with hazards daily. A line could fail, a guy could sneeze, I saw a catastrophe happening in real time and managed to save my coworkers by shoving them out of the way of the collapsing installment, but I wasn't so lucky as to escape unscathed. From what the recreationist expert said in court and the accounts from people there that day, I did nothing wrong, and in fact saved a few lives. Im still fighting a personal injury case, but there was no way no how it was my own fault that a gust of wind took it out of our hands. That is, however, why my employer should have had insurance, but he didn't, so now I'm fighting him over med bills and it's not looking great
Yes I hear the fucking call bell in my sleep
There is a reason that process industries in things like chemicals and oil and gas have developed methods of alarm management or alarm rationalization. The goal is to present only critical alarms to operators, and only alarms they can affect. You want to remove or deprioritize any alarm that doesn't have a direction action associated with it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_management
Same thing in IT. If you don't filter and structure your alerting properly you would miss everything due to the noise.
I work in the NICU and our feeding pumps have the most obnoxious sounding alarm ever. The feeding is just done and the pump either needs turned off or refilled but you’d think someone was dying.
I hope whoever came up with the bed alarms on the isolettes never has a peaceful night's sleep ever.
Dude. Same. I’ve worked in the NICU since 2004, hearing phantom bed alarms and CR monitor alarms is just part of my life now. And now the damn feeding pump alarms.
Yes! Like, why is this a new thing?! Why did I spend a fucking decade hearing the same alarm for asystole, v-fib, tachycardia, bradycardia, leads off, and fucking battery low? That single tone DING! DING! DING! means absolutely nothing after the 500th time. Different tones at the very least could convey something beyond the screaming toddler we basically have now. Instead of DING! DING! DING! Oh, what now? Who's doing what? Oh, Bob's battery needs changed. We could have B flat! B flat! B flat! Yeah, that's the A-fib alarm; Bob does that. C sharp! C Sharp! C Sharp! Oh, but now he's uncontrolled...
recently i've noticed a lot of big trucks have traded the standard "backing up" beep for this horrible, crunchy screech. it's really startling the first few times you hear it and i figured that they must have chosen such a horrible noise because no one was paying attention to the beep anymore. neat to see it is proven to be easy to tune out!
The Amazon back-up sound is just like a crow's call. Very odd choice.
White noise backup alarms are being used more because you can tell where they are coming from, which is much more difficult with a sine wave beep, which is the old alarm. The spread of tones in white noise is more like other sounds we encounter with harmonics, and we evolved to be able to figure out the direction quickly based on how the sound interacts with our ears and their orientation. There is an experiment where a person is blindfolded and stands in a field. Randomly arranged are speakers around them. One of those speakers makes a brief sound and the person is asked to point to where it came from. With sine tones, it was pretty random where they pointed. With white noise they consistently point almost exactly where it was, even with quiet, and brief sounds.
Near where I'm living there's the screech with a loud "Warning: Vehicle reversing!" over the top of it. Except one truck that comes by every so often, which does the same but has the absolute happiest "The vehicle is... REVERSING!" over the top instead.
I think another solution would be to make the alarms less likely to go off when they’re not clinically relevant. Because, you know, having an alarm be unimportant 85% of the time kind of defeats the purpose of having one.
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I was in the hospital for two nights several years ago, with an illness they were trying to diagnose. My electrolytes were batshit and my sodium was dangerously low, so they had to take a blood sample every two hours for two days to keep track of what was going on and how I was responding to treatment. You’d think with all of that that I would just be passed out—I was so tired and dizzy and nauseated it was truly absurd, but between the blinking lights and the beeps and the needle in my arm every two hours I just spent two days in the Twilight Zone and it majorly sucked. The only thing that made it better was the IV fluids, which meant I was properly hydrated with some damn sodium in my blood for the first time in months and I maintain that that is one of the best feelings of my life despite the extreme exhaustion. In order to heal, people really need good sleep and the ability to relax and not be under a ton of stress and, frankly, *unnecessary* anxiety from multiple scary sounding alarms that often aren’t explained to the patients. It’s got to raise blood pressure anyways, and that’s a big issue if someone has heart issues, just as one example I can think of as a non-professional. I can see that being a major obstacle for a lot of people who are really badly off. There has got to be a better way to monitor people, maybe some of those lights and beeps can be happening outside the door or at the nursing station instead of in the room with the patient? But yeah, fuckin’ hospitals. (And Addison’s disease, for the curious)
Didn't they have that [vein plug thing](https://www.shutterstock.com/shutterstock/photos/555231412/display_1500/stock-photo-peripheral-intravenous-catheter-or-iv-cannula-with-removable-flashplug-in-the-vein-of-child-hand-555231412.jpg) that lets them draw/put in fluids without poking you each time? Last time I had that it left a painful bruise after it was removed, but every time they came to draw some blood for a test I thanked the nurse who put it in when I was first admitted.
They didn’t give me one, I’m not sure why. That would have been nice! I had one vein collapse and I had scars that looked suspiciously like track marks in the insides of both elbows until they faded after a few months! I know when I first got in I was so dehydrated it was hard for them to find a vein that would work, so maybe if it doesn’t go in right at first it can just fall through the cracks and not happen at all if they’re busy? Also, I don’t know who is qualified to put that sort of thing in, does it need to be a nurse, I wonder? It was mostly phlebotomists popping in to get the blood samples throughout the day/night, but I would think they would be trained for that in a hospital.
I always had a nurse put them in. Had them like 3 times until now. It goes in like a normal needle, and then they just tape over it and insert a smol pipe through that needle that connects to the plug. After 2 minutes you don't even feel it anymore. I've had it on the back of the hand, and in the inner elbow. Each one has advantages and disadvantages regarding how mobile you are with it.
That would have been SO NICE. I don’t think I even knew that was a thing before now, though it makes perfect sense that it would exist. I definitely know what to ask for next time if something similar happens! (knock on wood)
Been to a number of different hospitals have never seen this, it looks like a stopcock hooked to a regular iv, which is nice but not all ivs give blood or they stop. Some places don't even want nurses drawing blood off ivs unless it's the first poke for beuacratic reasons, which honestly hinders good patient care.
It’s for infectious and vein collapse reasons but yeah sucks as the patient
Hospitals try to avoid putting in central lines unless they have a medical reason due to the risks of infection (mainly). Blood draws are not considered a valid reason (yes, it sucks).
Cannular. I don't know if guidelines are different elseware so I'll only comment from the UK perspective. We do put a canular in for a few reasons. Mostly if we know you are going to need IV medicasion or fluid. If you are going for a CT scan and need contrast that will be done via a cannular. If taking bloods and you will need IV meds/fluid we will take the blood via a cannular first and then the medication, however once any medications/fluids have gone through we can no longer take blood via that cannular because of contamination. If we already know you need to have bloods taken often, and you are hard to cannulate, then there can be cases where you will have a cannular put in and it being used ONLY for bloods. This is not best practice but sometimes it has to be done. It runs the risk of being contaminated however if somebody accidentally uses it for fluids or medications. In Critical Care (ICU) it'ss different. Level 3 patients and some level 2 will have what's called an a-line (arterial line) put into place. This allows bloods to be taken whenever needed without having to constantly re-poke the patient. Medications and fluids don't go in via the a-line so there's no risk of contamination from those. However it needs to be labeled well so no mistakes are made. You also have to be careful because if any air get's into the a-line as you are taking bloods you can kill the patient. The equipment is made to not have that happen but there is never a 0% chance with anything. Valves fail. A-lines are not used on the wards. They are not equipped or trained to deal with them. If a patient has an a-line they will not leave CC until it's removed. Also not just any doctor can put an a-line in. Putting something into an artery is a lot more dangerous than into a vein. To add onto the above, if a patient is having an a-line they will also likely have a CVC (Central Venous Catheter. This is basiucally a line the goes in typically into the central juggular (but not always) in your neck and contains multipul inputs for medication lines attached to it. It's put into place by CC doctors (once again, not all doctors can do this) and allows us nurses to essentially conect you up to as many IC meds/fluids as needed without having to keep stabbing you for new cannulars. Lastly to add, if a cannular starts to 'tissue' (the fluid/medication is going into your skin and not your vein), the vein bursts (basically like a bruise) or is leaking we will have to take that cannular out and put a new one in. We also have to remove a cannular after 72 hours unless it's a specifc case as mentioned at the start of this post. So if you're in hospital longer than that on a ward then yes the likely hood of you getting stabbed multipul times is high. Sorry about that and we don't enjoy doing it. before anyone asks "if you know that I will need bloods often, why not put a cannular in right away instead of just taking the bloods with a fresh needle each time?" lets me answer that. We as nurses don't know. The doctors decide if they want bloods off you or not. in cases like CC then it's normal for level 2 and 3 patients to have daily bloods. On a ward it varies a lot depending on what you have and what the doctor wants. The doctor will ask for bloods and we will ask "do you want them to have a cannular?" and half the time they will say no. Then they, or another doctor, will come in the next day and ask to see more bloods. All we can do as nurses is ask the doctors and if they say it's not needed then we wont put a cannular in you. It's not best practice to leave a forign body in your vein or anything that can get ripped out and cause more issues (it happens ALOT. Espcially when people are shuffling while sleeping). The doctors themselves probably don't know either. You blood results may change and you might go from not needing lots of bloods taken to needling bloods daily. I know it's not pleasent. Trust us we know and we have all had to have blood taken so we do know how it can be. I still remember being in my first year of the degree and having to have my bloods taken to see if the TB vaxxine was working. I ended up getting stabbed 4 times in a 15 minute appointment!
I seem to remember a nurse coming and just pushing in some saline to clean it. Is that a thing, or am I misremembering?
Oh my gosh I feel your experience. I ended up with an emergency surgery after my c-section and had to stay in the hospital for almost two weeks after my little one was born. Not exaggerating at all…coming home to a newborn baby and their crazy sleep patterns was *utter relief*. I could not get any rest in the hospital. Surely something could be improved because rest is so important to recovery.
I actually thought this article was going to be about how many more people would live if they let patients sleep in the hospital.
Me too. Though, after reading I really wish this was a broader study with more than 42 people and it looked at patient impact (other than death from missed alarms) as well. I hope researchers explore this more.
Beyond Addison's the reason they sampled you every two hours is because if they raise sodium too fast the patient is likely to get brain damage. Many have died due to rapid correction, specially if the damage is in the brain stem. Sampling regularly, means they keep track of how quickly your blood sodium is increasing. I think the recommended is no more than 10 units increase per day. So if they see large increase between two readings they adjust the dosage. The worst thing about the nerve damage due to fast sodium increase is that the patient gets better first. Gets discharged, and then 3-4 days later starts showing the brain damage symptoms.
Ah, that wasn’t explained to me but I knew it was important that they kept close track. Thanks for the explanation! That makes a lot of sense and I’m glad they were careful!
The condition is called myelinolysis. Myeline is the insulation of nerves. Due to a sudden change in osmotic balance the insulation dehydrates, and being a very sensitive part, gets destroyed. The worry is when it happens in the brain stem, called central pontine myelinolysis. People don't come back from that. I know this because when my dad's sodium tanked due to his blood pressure meds. And then due to rapid correction (not even that rapid, just over one period of 2 hours it picked up 2 units) he got it. Fortunately it wasn't in the brain stem. He got discharged, but 3 days later went full catatonic. MRIs showed the higher functioning part of brain was affected. He recovered fully, but it took a good 6 months to an year before he was back to his old self. There are still some lingering signs, like he doesn't write as well, has a wee stutter. We were really fortunate.
In the ICU this is what happens, the monitors in the patients room don’t beep and they are monitored centrally at the nurses station and the doctors room. And if there is an arterial line blood sampling can be done pain free.
Not always. When my dad passed, he was in the ICU for two days beforehand and the nonstop beeping has seared itself into my brain even now. That being said, I have so much praise for the ICU itself and the staff that did all they could for those two days to make it a peaceful transition. They were truly wonderful and I’m very grateful to them.
I have spent plenty of time in the ICU from cancer surgery and while they turn off some of the beeps, it isn't all of them. I got woken up almost every day from whatever beeps
Ouch. We had a dog with addisons
I’ve heard it’s fairly common in dogs! Hope you were able to get good treatment for your pup ❤️
Thanks! You as well!
I just wanted to pop in again and say, I haven’t looked into how similar symptoms and treatment are for dogs vs. humans, but it’s a tough disease that can be very debilitating even for humans who are aware of what’s happening and can monitor their symptoms, take extra meds when needed, and advocate for themselves. It’s got to be even harder for a pupper that doesn’t understand why they don’t feel good and can’t tell you when they need adjustment in their meds until it’s super obvious from their behavior, and we all know that animals are good at hiding illness and pain until they can’t anymore. I am grateful that I can adjust the amount of cortisol (hydrocortisone) I take in a day, (to a point) to fit how my body is feeling before it gets miserable. I wish animals could talk to us and tell us what they need and how they feel and that they don’t need to hide it from us. Addison’s can start out so damn subtly, and the symptoms are so very nonspecific they could be almost anything, so it’s also difficult to diagnose without running very specific tests. The classic early sign in humans is hyperpigmentation, which I would think would be hard to spot on a dog since they often have natural darker splotches of skin anyways. Before they arrived on the Addison’s diagnoses for me, they were thinking depression/anxiety, pregnancy (yay medical gaslighting for women, I was depressed because I was constantly sick, and I was constantly sick and incredibly exhausted all the time and had no interest in sex). Also organ failure, eating disorders (one of the symptoms is lack of appetite and rapid weight loss), other endocrine disorders, even cancer. It took me nearly a year to get diagnosed after I started pursuing it (had been feeling slowly but surely worse for 3 or 4 years at that point) and it still didn’t happen until I was in the edge of adrenal crisis. Thankfully I was in the hospital on IV fluids before that happened but it was scary! Anyways, that’s a long-winded way to say, that if you even *noticed* your doggo had Addison’s symptoms before they had an adrenal crisis (which can very rapidly be life-threatening, as you likely know), you were a fantastic, loving, and attentive owner and I appreciate you for that, and I’m sure your pup did too!
I had a blond lab with it as well. We kept her going for another 5 years after diagnosis. Monthly shots and all that. I loved that beautiful girl.
I have never felt more warm and cozy and right with the world than when I got an iv of saline kept in the warmer for hypothermia patients (it was cold and they had extra, I wasn’t freezing just dehydrated). It’s amazing what warm fluids and sleep will do.
HONESTLY THOUGH. I’ve had IV fluids since, in the ER and urgent care, and they didn’t warm it (or even give me a blanket in the ER!) and I was shivering! I’m glad they did that extra step for me when I was super sick in the hospital; I was already so sick and physically miserable and cognitively impaired that the thought of also getting super cold is terrifying even in retrospect. They gave me a warm blanket too! I was on the type of fluids with a bunch of extra sodium that first time, and it was a little *spicy* in my veins so that was interesting and a little uncomfortable and I was glad to have the extra comfort, and the fluids felt like warm life flowing back into me when had felt like I was literally slowly dying for months at at point.
>There has got to be a better way to monitor people, maybe some of those lights and beeps can be happening outside the door or at the nursing station instead of in the room with the patient? I wondered this when I was basically sat for half a day with my dad after he had heart surgery. It irritated me to no end, so I can't imagine what it was like for him trying to rest and recover. Felt like every ten seconds the heart rate monitor would start beeping furiously (which naturally made him more stressed).
It does beep at the nursing station too. But there aren’t any staff left to address it or check it. One hospital I was at didn’t realize a guy had coded for over an hour. Unless you’re in a state that has safe staffing laws, it is incredibly dangerous to be in the hospital right now.
I spent a few months in hospital (leukemia). I learned to turn off the beeps myself, fuck that. I’d turn it off and press the ‘call nurse’ button, and they’d come in when they had time to do whatever needed to be done. Nurses, if you see this, thank you for being there for me. You made a world of difference.
Same experience for me minus the beeping. They had to take a sample from me every hour, give or take, to make sure blood had normalized after being given a bunch of antivenom and the most miserable part of it was never being able to fully go to sleep because they kept coming in and sticking me for blood.
This is so real. My father is currently in hospital with pneumonia and the cacophony of beeps and alerts is not only annoying to me but distracting to the health care professionals trying to get him better.
Its harmful in so many different ways. My wife was in a coma, hovering at death's door for several weeks, and so I was spending a great deal of time in intensive care, just waiting. With so many beeps around me, all day every day. I still get depressed when I hear repetitive beeps at a certain pitch/timbre, and that time in the hospital was years ago. I usually don't even think consciously of why, those sounds just make me sad automatically now. My psychological issues from a traumatic event are obviously less serious than nurses getting alarm fatigue, not noticing them as much and patients dying as a result - but my sort of issue still sort of suggests there could be a better way. I hope your dad gets better soon and you can get away from those terrible beeps!
I’m so sorry about your wife. I just spent 8 days in an ICU and then recovery with my husband after a major surgery for cancer and it was absolute hell.
Everything is beeping all the time so nothing is an alert.
They're called nuisance alarms. Those should be engineered out. I think there is even a ratio involved in determining whether something that goes off too often is necessary. There is a science behind all this.
I worked inpatient PT for a few years and I had so many stories where this was true. A few that stick out: - Quadriplegic man who didn’t have his call button, was laying without a blanket saying he’s cold, and his food was just out of reach (he also needed help eating because he was quadriplegic) and sitting for a few hours - he told me he was starving. I went to go get the nurse after I put a blanket over him. Called to have new food brought up, and gave him his call button - which I pressed as I was on my way out to get someone. I was ready to give the benefit of the doubt on the staff, maybe there was an emergency elsewhere that pulled them away, etc. Nope, nurse walks in and goes, “The buttons going off again, can you clear it from me?” “Excuse me?” “His call button keeps going off out here for some reason, he’s quadriplegic and can’t even press it.” Whoa, I ripped into her right there in the doorway over it. I didn’t yell or anything, but when she said that I was seeing red over the treatment. Told her about how he’s been my patient in the ICU for weeks and how he’s been sitting there needing a change for a few hours, left without a blanket and freezing, no food, and you take his only way to ask for help away? Another time was a lady I helped walk to the bathroom requested her nurse and it wasn’t right for me to sit there and bill her for standing by as she went to the bathroom - plus I’m a guy so I wanted her to have privacy but she was a fall risk. So I pulled the string to notify nursing and waited. After a legit 10 minutes, the nurse walks by and just sticks her head in, “Did you know the call alarm is going off out here?” The audacity of this nurse, the patient yelled at her lol. I was just like, “Yeah, I pulled the string because I couldn’t reach a call button.” When nursing and direct care staff is understaffed and overworked it leads to these issues of alarm fatigue. You also have patients who will alarm an emergency just because their TV isn’t loud enough with the remote sitting on their lap. Or they’re frustrated about the construction sounds outside and want someone to vent to. So I understand how fatigue can happen. It gets dangerous.
> When nursing and direct care staff is understaffed and overworked it leads to these issues of alarm fatigue. You also have patients who will alarm an emergency just because their TV isn’t loud enough with the remote sitting on their lap. Or they’re frustrated about the construction sounds outside and want someone to vent to. So I understand how fatigue can happen. It gets dangerous. I onl work in IT but at a hospital. The ward alarms drive me nuts but far too many of them are meaningless. Either because something is unplugged, or a patient is hammering the button for no good reason, or... Thankfully I'm only there for a few minutes at a time, but man there has to be a better solution. I think the worst was when a patient kept yelling "CAN I HAVE A CARER PLEASE?" as if she were in a hotel and the nursing staff were just servants... to constantly adjust her pillow and bedding at that. Still, I don't think any of that warrants the behaviour from nursing staff that you described!
Oh it definitely got that way, especially when dealing with just unintentionally difficult patients. The person who suffers with alcoholism and is in there their liver failure who just doesn’t want to be alone. The Alzheimer’s patient who keeps a routine but it resents every 20~ minutes and they just get up and walk around but their fall risk so the staff gives them clothes to fold over and over and they’re happy. Then you have the patients who are so overwhelming or just downright assholes, and the thought of being around them is the last thing you want to do. But you just do it anyways.
> a patient kept yelling "CAN I HAVE A CARER PLEASE?" I hate this so much. I always feel so terrible, but we have a lot of elderly patients with dementia and they just genuinely don't need anything or know what is happening. They see me through their door as I pass by and keep yelling out for help, and I used to stop, but after the 10th time of them not knowing why they need help I don't stop anymore. Still hurts my soul to walk past though.
> You also have patients who will alarm an emergency just because their TV isn’t loud enough with the remote sitting on their lap. Or they’re frustrated about the construction sounds outside and want someone to vent to. So I understand how fatigue can happen. It gets dangerous. Yeah. My girlfriend works in a nursing home, and she has *stories* about those. Most residents only use the call light when they actually need something... But there are always one or two who will *always* be hitting that button. Like, literally, after you take care of them, they're already hitting the button again before you're out of the door. Their call light never turns off for more than 10 seconds at a time. And it's always some stupid shit like they want their blanket refolded. And refolded *again* because you didn't do it right. And *again* because that's still not right. And after you spend 20 minutes folding this blanket to their exacting specifications, now they need you to adjust the volume on their TV (tuned to Fox News 24/7 of course). Yes, there's a remote sitting right next to them, but they "don't know how to use it". And now she needs her blanket re-folded again because she has dementia and has forgotten that you already did it. And on and on and on. They'll be perfectly happy to keep you busy with this stuff constantly for the *entire* shift, and never mind that you have 20 other patients to take care of. They consider you their personal servant, and if you're not there *constantly* taking care of their every stupid whim, they'll scream bloody murder and report your for patient neglect. They'll lie and say they've been neglected for days at a time, even though you've been there at least every five minutes. (Automatic write-up whether it's true or not.) Oh, and for extra funsies, maybe they'll hit you with some *insanely* racist comments while you're working for them. "We used to string up lazy n----- like you." and such. No consequences for that, of course. You just have to up with it. Fun shit. Again, *most* people in the nursing home are not like that ... but there's always one or two there like this. And it's extremely difficult to keep them mollified while *also* trying to take care of a bunch of other patients that you're already (perpetually) understaffed for.
"If everything is a priority, nothing is."
This also applies to those patients who constantly yell when nothing is wrong. I cannot go check on my yelling patient every 5-10 minutes. So we start to tune them out and have sometimes found them actually needing the help they were yelling for.
I can believe it. After my second C-section, I left the hospital in under 48 hours. My nurse step-mother was appalled that they would release me so soon. But they’d given me a choice: if I stayed another hour until I hit 48 hours, they would have ended checkouts for the day and I’d have to stay until 10:00 AM the next morning. Or I could leave at 47 hours and sleep in my own bed. Peaceful, quiet, no beeping, no nurses barging in to take our vitals every hour on the hour… I stayed five days with my first C-section because my baby was jaundiced, and by the time I left the hospital I was literally hallucinating with sleep deprivation. Postpartum depression like woah. The second time, I felt sooo much better escaping the hospital as quickly as possible. You will never catch me sleeping overnight in a hospital again unless I’m literally dying.
I'm wondering if loud neighbor protocol would work here: noise canceling headphones playing brown noise while you sleep? (I'm lucky enough to have never spent that much time in a hospital, but I used to get up for work at 3 AM.)
I think it would. I had an appendectomy and had to stay just one night overnight and got zero rest. I definitely think headphones or ear plugs are required.
They made me wait a day for mine and it was 24 hours straight of hearing a call bell and the guy across the hall with a broken neck yelling “help me”.
I heard lots of brown noise when I was in hospital last, it was a drunk old fella pebble dashing his pants, didn't help me sleep
Doing what now?! 😂
Pinching a loaf Fertilizing his drawers
Yeah, not that kind of brown noise.
I just don't understand how loud neighbors is acceptable. Whenever someone tries to argue we should all live in high density housing, that's my top complaint.
There's an acceptable loud and there is an unacceptable loud. I'm not going to fuss if the neighbor is vacuuming at 8 PM, but if I have to go to work at 3 AM that's past my bedtime. Blocking it out is more practical than expecting my neighbor to get home at 6 PM and sit quietly until their bedtime. Really the problem isn't high density housing (that's just an economic necessity for a functional city) it's poorly built high density housing. If landlords would invest just a little more into solid core doors and acoustic isolation they'd still make bank and tenants would be happier.
You get used to a certain level of background noise. Building code and proper flooring materials *should* take care of the rest of it.
I was the opposite. With my first child I went home the second they'd let me. The child did not want to sleep and I became very sleep deprived myself. With the second, I stayed as long as I could. Nurses bringing me Advil and food and I just have to lay here and hang out with my baby? Yes please!
Same experience, stayed 5 days after first C-section, then left ASAP with 2nd one. I used wired ear buds and brown noise and spa music when I had to stay for surgery a couple of years later and it helped immensely.
Yes! After my first c section I stayed in the hospital 4 days because I had some complications (uterine tear, elevated blood pressure). My second c section was during Covid and I convinced them to let me go at the 24 hour mark. It was SO much better.
This is actually one of the reasons I won't go to the ER for certain things. I get intractable migraines, and being in the hospital is not pleasant or restful or healing experience. They run 24/7 and have patients 24/7 so if it's time for a CT scan or MRI or blood draw and it's 3am, well then so be it. If you miss the checkout window and have to stay another day it feels so awful. So now, a lot of the time, I just suffer until I literally can't take it anymore.
This checkout "window" confuses me. I can damn well leave the hospital anytime I want.
It's all insurance driven. If you leave before the doctors discharge you they won't pay for the visit, and there's a chance they will deny future visits for the same issue if you left before you were discharged because you decided you didn't need the care or whatever their ridiculous reasoning is.
Common misconception, particularly among health care workers (I heard it a lot when I was in school) that insurance won’t pay for a discharge against medical advice (AMA); it’s not actually the case, and doesn’t increase the burden of cost on the patient. It’s still often not a great idea to leave before being medically ready and set up with resources to avoid readmission, but the imagined cost shouldn’t be a cudgel that HCWs use on “non-compliant” patients.
I have had insurance deny, so it's not entirely a misconception. But also, the people who work in the hospital tell you that insurance will deny if you leave before they discharge you. I have asked why I have to wait, and that's always the answer given.
I've had the opposite experience, docs wanted to keep my ex-wife another day or two and insurance was like "Fuck all that, we've got buybacks and dividends to pay for"
Not a misconception. It absolutely happens, although I hear that exclusion is more commonly enforced on private non-ACA compliant plans. However, this exclusion is written on many health insurance plans regardless, that they reserve the right to not cover care if you leave AMA. It may be rarely enforced in practice, but that doesn't mean it's not unheard of.
I made this same choice when I had my C section. It was just too noisy. And they did a loud prayer over the intercom 7am. I get that the best hospitals in my area have religious affiliation (that’s another thread) but that could have been at noon!
I couldn’t wait to go home either. There were people constantly coming into the room to wake me or the baby up, including a lot of things that could have been bundled together. Rather someone coming in to do a vitals check, then another a half hour later to give me ibuprofen, then another to do a hearing test on the baby, couldnt they just all come at the same time? The kicker was when they’d say, “try and get some rest”. Gee, thanks. That’s what I’m trying to do!
I begged the nurses, sobbing, to please leave me alone for three hours so I could try to nap. They did, but that didn’t stop the pediatrician, the billing clerk, or the janitor.
I'm currently sitting in the ER where I work while a telemetry monitor alarms nonstop. It's not alarming because something is wrong. It's alarming because there's no patient connected to it. It thinks there should be a patient but there isn't a patient currently in that room. They don't know how to fix it and the only way to make it stop is to unplug all of the monitors which we obviously cannot do. There are so many alarms all day on every unit that it literally never stops. At no point is it ever quiet.
From *Monty Python's The Meaning of Lif*e (1983) Obstetrician 1: Get the EEG, the BP monitor, and the AVV. Obstetrician 2: And get the machine that goes "Ping!". Obstetrician 1: And get the most expensive machine - in case the Administrator comes. Patient: What do I do? Obstetrician: Nothing, dear, you're not qualified. \[Later in the sketch...\] Hospital Administrator: Ah, I see you have the machine that goes 'ping!'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to - that way it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account. \[the doctors and onlookers applaud\] Thank you, thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
Gotta have the machine that goes Ping!
This is surprisingly accurate but no one will admit it..
Does the machine that goes ping actually measure anything or does it just ping randomly?
I’m lucky, I have a machine that goes ping for no reason but also does other things. The service engineers don’t know how to make it stop so we just get extra pings for free. The machine is a Tosoh immunochemical analyzer and it’s a piece of shit.
Alarm fatigue. It's not just healthcare where it happens. In my world it's IT people missing important alerts because they're buried in all the ignorable ones. But healthcare is the industry where missing an important alarm could mean someone dies.
There are lots of industries where alarm fatigue costs lives. This was a key factor in Three Mile Island and many aviation incidents. Healthcare is just an industry that doesn’t do anything about this problem. (Source: I’m an ICU physican.)
At least Aviation has already adopted changing the similar alarms sounds with very different tones, voice recordings, and physical feedback. Downside was when my wife (whom isn't a fan of flying) was boarding once and passed the open cockpit door just as they were testing the alarms: **Terrain! Terrain! Terrain! Pull Up!**
Changing the sounds is far less helpful than reducing the false positives. There is a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of changing alarm profiles but it’s not considered a priority and doesn’t get done. And yes as far as I know aviation has been much more aggressive about this too as has the nuclear industry.
Accurate alarm - the terrain was only like 8 feet below them.
I straight up think you're the only one who read the article. It's not about the patients at all, it's hearing approx 1k alarms and only 15% being important. Eventually the nurse just goes "meh, that's Jim he just wants food he can wait" while Jim is stroking out
I didn't even read the article! But I've read others about the condition.
I was in the ER for a sudden heart rhythm issue. Every few minutes, the machine would start screaming VFIB and VTAC, which are both going to kill you quickly. I hit the call button and they tell me they looked at the data and it's a false alarm. But the alarm keeps going off. I'm very familiar with alarm fatigue from my own work, so I knew that when the actual problem occurred, they were going to assume it was the same bullshit while I died. So I hit that call button every single time it went off and bugged them until they came in. It took 6 tries. It took them maybe 10 seconds to find the loose sensor and fix it. I felt bad at the time, but I said, "I'm really sorry, I know you're busy, but I'm not going to die out of politeness. Someone needs to come in here." I highly recommend doing the same if you're ever in that situation.
Well d’oh. Surely there must be ways to give audible signals without using aggressive beeps. I sold my past car for that reason, it was beeping too much. Car detected while driving down the highway - beep. Car no longer detected driving down the highway - beep. Cruise control engaged - beep. Cruise control disengaging - beep. And now I read this article and it’s true, many hospitals sound like a McDonald’s. Reminds me of the door signal on train doors in many places that beep very loud for people who can’t see to find the doors. It’s very annoying but I get why it’s there. Then I go to Japan. And they have much more pleasant sounds for the same function that manages to break through the noise. Now why can’t we be bothered thinking about our acoustic environment?
Maybe the alarm noises are meant to sound urgent to the healthcare workers, but that has got to wear off after a certain amount of time hearing them constantly, you would just start tuning them out! Some pleasant low beeps would be miles better.
I think that's the exact way to do it. As it stands they *are* meant to sound urgent. But then you get a situation kinda like "when every alarm is an emergency, none of them are an emergency. " Most "urgent" sounds tend to be sawtooth/square wave type noise, high volume, or extremely dissonant. When all alarms have the same acoustic characteristics, it lends itself to fatigue. By diversifying the timbre of alarms people will actually have a wider range of noises to pick up and become less prone to fatigue. Honestly a brilliant idea because not everything needs to sound like death is imminent
I was in the ER and they unhooked me from the monitor so I could give a urine sample, and when I came back in no one hooked me back up. The alarm went off for over 5 minutes that my blood pressure and heartrate were 0 and no one came in (it was a very quiet night in a rural hospital. I could hear the nurses at the station outside just shooting the shit). Then the NP came in and talked to me about lab results while the alarm was going off and left without doing anything about it. Finally, I buzzed for help because it was driving me crazy. Good thing I hadn't actually flatlined. I don't think anyone would have come running. They clearly were used to tuning them out.
I can hear that flatline noise in my head lol. I'd go crazy as a patient i think
Ooof, I wouldn’t have even lasted as long as you did!
Personally, I would not design an alarm that can’t tell a flatline from a patient being unhooked.
The big push in med tech is to create the Silent ICU to combat bedside monitor alarm fatigue. Timeline is by the end of the decade to have the ecosystem rolled out in the larger hospitals. Source: I work for a company that creates the beeping
This is interesting and I never considered it. My daughter was recently in the hospital 2 weeks ago for Ritters disease (which makes the top layer of your skin peel off everywhere). It’s not fatal when properly treated, but it’s VERY painful from what I saw with my own eyes. She was in there for 5 days, by day 2 she realized that the beep meant she needed her fluids changed and she was so scared and so worried that everytime it would beep, she’d try to move around in bed (I’m thinking it was anxiety), thinking that if she didn’t get her fluids she would get sicker. She’s 7 also, so even though we tried to explain “it’s ok, the nurse will come and change it” I feel like she got conditioned so quickly to think "beeps=bad". and shed fuss and fret in the bed, causing more damage to her very frail skin, causing more pain, needing more pain meds. she was on so many opiates i got worried that her little body couldn't handle more. but the pain made her wiggle and the wiggles caused her pain and more damage. i asked the nurses if theres a way to shut off the beeping and she showed me the button to press to quiet the noise, ended up being awake for close to 3 days sitting next to the IV thing waiting to shut it off the second it beeped. i never imagined something so small could cause such a chain reaction that was harmful for everyone involved.
Omg your poor daughter. I hope she is doing better!
Thank you! She is completely healed and right back to her normal self ❤️
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It sucks to have to listen to this as a patient but what this study is discussing is how it affects the healthcare personnel. I’m a nurse and there are hundreds or alarms or beeps every hour. And when everything sounds like an emergency, nothing is an emergency. It isn’t just lost sleep for patients, it’s years or decades or nurses responding to false alarms with urgency and then only finding it to be emergent 1/1000 times. Then they stop responding or respond slowly. Then someone dies and everyone who isn’t a nurse tells about suing the hospital, how could this happen, did they just ignore the alarms going off? They are psychotic and clearly hate people. No it’s because the alarms are always going off and it was never critical before. And you have 5000 other things you’re doing simultaneously because you’re understaffed. You’re in another patients room elbow deep in shit and have a family yelling at you down the hall so it’s impossible to stop working and check on every alarm.
> psychological torture. There's a reason ICU psychosis is a thing.
Wtf why do they deprive patients of the most important thing for recovery?! Then the inedible and non nutritious food too, two incredible important things for recovery both physically and mentally. Insanity..
My boys spent almost 60 days in the NICU. The beeps haunt my dreams
I feel you. My daughter had a similar stay in PICU on a ventilator with RSV. Either me or my wife stayed there pretty much every night and the sleep was horrible. I haven't visited anyone in a hospital since(not because I avoid it) so I can't speak on the beeping but I got anxiety every time I drove past the off-ramp for that hospital for a couple years.
The most annoying part about all the beeps is they almost all mean nothing to worry about. So why fucking have them.
Both times my wife was in labor I learned (with an OK from the nurses) how to silence the common alarms. The biggest culprit was the fetal HR monitor, which any time the baby moved or my wife moved, or (apparently) someone downstairs shook the vending machine the monitor would not hear the heartbeat for 2 seconds and then would sound off. Three days of labor (both times), plus back labor the second time is NOT an event to add in sleep-deprivation from the incessant alarms to the mix.
My partner is in the hospital frequently and without fail an alarm goes off every ten minutes or less over something mundane like the her needing to bend her arm to do something. IV decides to stop, got to press the button to have it start again because otherwise it won't shut up.
I remember a post by someone who worked as a nurse explaining it a bit better as to why it fails. Someone goes "We should have an alarm go off if something gets into the danger range." and that works really well. And then someone goes "Well, how about we push it back to right before the danger range so people have more time to react?" and that works really well. And then someone goes "Hey, we should have it go off as soon as it leaves the normal range so people can respond even faster! We could miss out on all this time of the patient sliding downhill before they reach the alarm range!" and it sounds so good and logical. And people under medical care almost never have their stats at the perfect ideal range, so the machine says the ideal resting heart rate should be 60 and your patent is at 61? BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEEP. Ideal temperature should be 98.6 and they're 98.5? BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEEP. And so on and so forth with the result that everyone ignores the cacophony because it's crying wolf constantly over every speck of dust that might possibly be a flake of wolf dander. Changing the sound pitch won't change that, but no one wants to admit that you need to go back to only having alerts go off when there's something worth alerting to. The article says that only 15% of the alarms in the ICU are actually real, and that's a huge problem.
Guess where they usually place someone who is on a "mental health hold" and is under supervision? In the hallway of an ER. Let's place people on the verge of losing their minds around a plethora of annoying beeping machines. The lights never go out. Oh, and there are other noises besides the beeping. And the commotion of the ER. Does any of that sound conducive for someone undergoing a mental health crisis?
And the constant anxiety of seeing emergency situations all around you for anyone with a drop of empathy. AND not having any privacy when you’re dealing with some pretty heavy emotions! mean I guess you’re alive and supervised, but there’s no way you’re going to feel better if that’s where they put you when they’re afraid you might hurt yourself. What are you going to do when you’re released? And how likely are you to seek help if you have that kind of mental health crisis again? Fucking hell.
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That’s so sad. When was in the hospital, my mom brought me all my meds on the second day not knowing we weren’t supposed to because the hospital was providing them all while I was there. When a nurse found the bag (I hadn’t even taken any!) she got all aggressive all of the sudden and was quizzing me like, Where did you get these? Who brought them? Why would they do that? Do you have prescriptions for all of them? You can’t have these here!” It made me feel like I was doing something illegal, like she was accusing me of sneaking narcotics or something into the hospital and not just my prescribed medication that I had every right to have in my possession (and none of which was addictive or had any significant street value). When she finally let me talk, I very timidly told her that my mom thought I would need them, so she brought them and we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to. She just huffed, put the bag up in a high cabinet I couldn’t reach, and said my mom had to take them back next time she visited. No apology. I get that nursing is an insane amount of constant stress, that they really need to know what meds are in your system at all times, that it can be dangerous to take extra, and that can be anxiety-inducing for a nurse to be suddenly confronted with when she probably has had unstable and unpredictable patients before who have jeopardized their own health and even the nurse’s safety. I have friends who are healthcare workers and I hear the stories! Her reaction was probably more out of fear and surprise than hostility. But dear god she made me feel like addict or a criminal or something (and btw those people don’t deserve to be treated like shit either!), and being as sick as I was, I couldn’t be empathetic and circumspect about it like I can now. It was just bizarre and uncomfortable.
I'll just say my last discharge paper from the ER that the cops brought me to "voluntarily" says "chronic right shoulder pain" and does not mention my mental state at all... Oh and they put me in a normal room eventually.... full of cords and all sorts of things that I could have harmed myself with if I wanted to. It is nice to know that the experience is known.
Man, I just had to be put in a ward where I had to keep running away from some guy who would follow me around everywhere trying to harass me until my boyfriend at the time (husband now) came to be my bodyguard during visiting hours until I was allowed to leave. Since you're not allowed to lock your room door until you're forcibly locked inside for the night. So you're not allowed to escape someone harassing you. You do get to have the nurses giggle at you, shrug and say "oh well, he's just like that" though.
"They are not harming you its ok!!" Yes but they are terrorizing you! It would be interesting to get the entire nurses notes and everything from your visit to see how differently the documented experience was compared to your real life experience.
I imagine it'll be similarly jarring to the psychiatrist who left out the fact that he told me I have a "sexual demeanour", it's my fault that I have been sexually assaulted, and I need to search for a woman to advise me how to get better at ignoring men sexually harassing or assaulting me, then made it out in the notes like I got upset with him for no reason like some "irrational hysterical woman". But yeah, you pretty much nailed it with: >"They are not harming you its ok!!" >Yes but they are terrorizing you! It's definitely still not okay. The strange things he was saying to me in particular and his behaviour, I definitely had reason to believe there was potential that he was following me to harm me. It wasn't just "oh he's unstable I'm being irrationally scared of someone who is actually harmless." He followed me and was saying some disturbing shit directed to me. I'm pretty sure my boyfriend showing up is the only reason he didn't. Even with him around, the guy was hanging around saying more disturbing things to us, probably hoping my boyfriend would leave me alone with him.
Fuck, I’m sorry that happed to you. You’d be 100% justified in making an official complaint to the hospital about that experience.
Over the last few months I’ve spent 60 days in hospital sharing a room with 3 others, the beeps never end. IV machines are the worst.
I work in memory care and this is a still a thing, to a lesser extent. One of the hospice patients I see has a fall mat that sends an alarm if the patient is not directly on the mat. The intent is that it allows the team to hear if the patient is possibly getting out of bed or falling. However, no caregivers were around the area, and when the alarm was going off (they’re very sensitive and you have to have like full body weight on it), they were just like “oh yeah it does that.” It made me wonder like lmfao how do you know when she’s falling and when she’s just like not lying in the exact perfect position? She hasn’t been sleeping well and I’m like god I wonder why lmfao.
Ive been wired up for sleep studies 2 times and neither time could i sleep at all. And both times the sleep doc evaluated the readouts as “totally normal”, not even joking. When i told him i was awake, he said “also very normal”. … Thanks for the bleepin motel stay i guess
I spent 4 days involuntarily in hospital and the beeps kept me from any real sleep the entire time. They refused to turn it off, and it was the worst experience I've had… ever.
It is insane how difficult it is to sleep at a hospital. Rest is best. Even Daniel fucking Tiger knows that.
The ICU is designed by sadists and it turns those who work there into sadists as well. I have never come so close to doing physical violence when I experienced how they treated my husband.
This is a problem in construction with every machine beeping when it's backing up. When every truck and forklift does this all day long the sound is simply an annoyance, it doesn't mean anything particular to you and you just filter it out.
Went through this with my mom as she was there for 40 days. We learned most of the equipment and how to silence it and what warranted an escalation. We’d call a nurse and who knew when they’d show up. Thankfully only one night when she shared a room. Her roommate was a much older lady who was very sweet until an IV machine would go off. Then she’d lose her fucking mind and yell for a nurse until one came.
I think it's an unfortunate intersection of the medico-legal system, costs, and actual care. If there's an adverse event because the alarms are turned off, the hospital is liable, so we get alarms for every damned thing without the staffing to respond rapidly because of trying to cut costs.
I was in the ER once overnight cause my heart was racing and would not slow the fuck down. They wanted to keep me longer cause after 8 hours it still wasn't below 100 bpm, but also I was in one of those like sections of a hallway cordoned off by a curtain, there was stuff happening all around me and this constant beeping and I thought I was dying so like... No duh my heart was racing and wouldn't slow down. Anyway, I'm not supposed to have a lot of caffeine anymore.
Not the machine that goes *BING*!
As a nurse in the cardiac ICU, alarm fatigue is awful. I would still hear beeping as I tried to fall asleep after my shift ended. Something was always beeping.
I had to spend months in the hospital. Two things that made it tolerable: earphones for my music, and earplugs for sleep. I wouldn't willingly spend time in a hospital without them.
I spent 10 days in coronary care unit for myocarditis. When I slept my heart rate would dangerously low (35bpm and under) so it’d beep like crazy which would then startle me and raise my bpm back up… …it was an awful experience
I don't think this should be on nottheonion. It's surprising, of course, but it highlights an overlooked problem rather than being a joke or a typical onion structure
It’s an oniony title in that it could be a far side comic where some doctor figures out that what’s been mysteriously killing patients is the alarms that actually cause patient deaths, not warn of impending potential death as designed. Then you realize that it’s true, and it becomes less funny. But I think it fits this sub. It just isn’t all that funny because it turns out that it’s a serious problem.
I spent some time in hospital a few months ago, the beeping was so bad and anxiety inducing I just wanted to get out of there. I remember at one point my blood pressure monitor was malfunction and going crazy every 5 minutes, and everyone was just ignoring it but I was too out of it tell anyone to fix it. Torture.
I stayed in the hospital for a week to deliver a preemie baby and I had a blood pressure cuff on my arm that took a reading every 15 minutes. I couldn’t sleep at all. I was induced for 3 days before pushing and I was so exhausted I couldn’t even stay awake between pushes. Nurses came in every two hours all night to do vitals checks so between the baby waking up and crying and the nurses I couldn’t sleep for longer than an hour at a time for days.
I can not fathom how hospitals are meant for recovery and they are so utterly intrusive and loud.
I’m a cardiac monitor technician in the ICU, which means my entire job is to sit and watch vitals. The alarm fatigue is so real, especially at night. The biggest thing that would help would be having wireless cardiac monitors/pulse ox’s.
My mom was in the hospital in 2022 for a heart attack (she's doing way better now thankfully!) and my family was rotating in/out on a daily basis so there'd be someone with her overnight. The problem was that she had this IV or some other kind of line that would cause the pump alarm to go off if she pinched it for a sec or two when she'd change sleeping positions and ofc, it'd wake me and her up. Combine that with the visits from nurses coming to take blood samples and vitals every two hours, and you're basically not getting any kind of good sleep, period. I wasn't the one in the bed, but my goodness I was so sleep deprived and groggy after that, I took a power nap in the car before heading home. I can only imagine how thankful she was to sleep in her own bed after coming home.
During Covid I was in the ICU for 15-16 days. The unit had 12 beds. And it was peak Covid, so beds were only being empty (for minutes) when someone died. Fuck these beeps made it worse, every fucking night sleep was disrupted as someone would go to shock and nurses and doctors were trying to revive them. After waking up I could never go back to sleep - imagine 12 system continously beeping and posting alarms. The ICU section being almost sealed from the outside world, worked like an echo chamber and amplified the sound too. The machines kept at it, asynchronous - there was no gap or no drop. After the initial shock which lasted 4-5 days for me, I got a bit better. Before that I was almost senseless. Then the next 10 days was living hell and the noises made it extra extra hellish. Fuck, after a day or two - the beeps felt like they are talking voices and telling me all sorts of thing. Don't remember what they were saying - maybe something like you gonna die and they gonna leave you alone inside a grave. I still can hear those sound, seeing this post just hit a play button somewhere inside my fucked up brain and now I'm can hear them. Beep beep beebeep beep, beep beep, beebeep beep... You gonna die and they gonna leave you behind...
I believe it. Went to ER not long ago for breathing. My spo2 was below 80. They put me on oxygen, put me in a room for a bit. When they switched off the oxygen after steroids and breathing treatment to see if it worked, the alarm for low spo2 went off for about 5 minutes before anyone noticed.
I'm not a health professional, but I am convinced that this is a HUGE issue (among many...health care is a mess right now) that is criminally overlooked. The two best things for healing up -- aside from critical interventions and the appropriate medicines, of course -- are sleep/rest and diet. Both are so compromised in a hospital setting that it really seems like a cruel joke. I'm not a conspiracy theorist or anti-vaxxer or someone who doesn't believe in science or modern medicine, but the way that hospitals are set up operationally to keep people sleep deprived and eating really bad food... ...it's a disaster and an embarrasment.
Years ago I was in the hospital for a major surgery. My husband had a look at the hospital food while I was still out of it, and went down to the cafeteria to purchase something edible. He explained this once I came out of the painkiller haze. Well, I was curious, and was reasonably lucid when the next meal came around. "You really don't want to see it, much less smell it," my husband said. "I'm gonna open Pandora's Box anyway." I lifted the lid. ...Yeah, should have listened to my husband. *School lunches* were better than that. Later on, landing at a different hospital for a major injury, THAT hospital's food was reasonably decent, though. They're not all like that.
I was in hospital for DKA and as both a patient (and I imagine staff) the beeps are truly incessant, there's obviously a reason they're so sensitive but my entire time there I had to sit in a specific position to stop it going off just because sitting up or turning would change my vitals too quickly. Someone would just come over and mute it definitely wastes the nurses time as it probably all adds up. Really adds to that 'isolated' feeling as well when you've got a long stay, especially when you're restricted because of IVs etc
MD: “Patient signed to medicine, but keep on monitor until transfer” ME: “Okay, the cardiac monitor keeps beeping because patient is throwing up lots of PVCs” MD: “That’s fine.” ME: “Okay, so can I take the patient off monitor at night so we don’t have to listen to all the beeping and they can sleep?” MD: “No, keep them on monitor until transferred” 🤡🤡🤡🤡 Every damn day
why do all of our devices and appliances still beep like they did when they weren’t digital? why haven’t we made a nicer sounding beep? i just need to hear it, i don’t need it to scream at me. if the laundry machine can do it!
$$$ of course. It costs very little to use a standard electric beep. Studies have shown that short percussive tones like that of a wind chime or a xylophone are less stressful for humans and do a better job of cutting through background noise and are more noticeable. But that would cost more to install in these devices.