what I did at the hospital

So me and the fetuses have had a bit of a wild ride over the past few days.  First a pig flu scare, then a rapidly vanishing cervix, and then contractions that were coming too frequently.  The result (of the latter two events, at least) was a day and a half at the hospital.  Right now I'm on bed rest and I have pills to stop the contractions, and I have every reason to believe that the babies are going to stay put for several weeks longer.  But...I've never been in the hospital overnight before, so this was a bit of an experience. 

I'm in the midst of writing a 12,000 page disquisition on the importance of wearing your own underwear at the hospital (something about maintaining the integrity of the self in a bureaucratic/institutional setting, blah blah), but in the meantime I thought I would share my observations about life on the inside:

• In the hospital there is something called "shower privileges," which I apparently did not have.  My solution was simply to stand in the middle of the bathroom and dump water over myself until I felt clean.  This made me feel all dark and rebellious, and also clean. 
• On a related note, you are not going to get arrested for unplugging your IV and other tubes.  I'm all about going to the bathroom by myself and I was not letting seventeen wires stand in my way.
  
• Because of pig flu hysteria, kids under age 5 are currently not allowed to visit patients at any hospitals in Jacksonville.  I pretty much lost my marbles when I discovered this.   
  
• The nurses automatically offer you Ambien.  At least, they automatically offered me Ambien.  Whether they were motivated by the fact that I had just spent three hours openly weeping about not being able to see my son, I could not tell you. 
  
• If you keep asking the same question to different people ("when can I go home?" "when is the doctor coming?" "is this medicine actually actually reducing the contractions and if not why do I have to stay here?" "what happens to my babies if they're born right this minute [hysterical sobbing]") you will never get the same answer twice.  It's kind of fantastic, in a zen-mindfulness way: you can keep asking, but you will never be answered. 
  
• The next time I have to stay at the hospital (which depends on whether my uterus freaks out again) I am bringing DVDs.  If you do not enjoy judge shows, the 700 Club, or PBS pledge drives, hospital television does not have much to offer.

To be fair, absolutely everybody I encountered in the hospital was amazingly nice.   And patient.  And very skilled at dealing with hysterical patients.  I have zero complaints on that front.   It's just the institutional setting that gets me kooky.  On an intellectual level, I realize that the maternity ward is not the same as a Soviet work camp, and that obstetrics is not entirely an evil cartel, but certain parts of my brain beg to differ.