6th May: Crazy Nights

At one point on the ward the nights became a little crazy and it felt like we were well and truly trapped in the funny farm. We were joined by an 83 yr old woman from Bangladesh who spoke not a word of English. She was diabetic but hardly ate anything. She preferred to delve around in her little cloth bag full of some sort of wacky backy chewing leaves which seemed to mellow her out. She slept all day but as the night crept in she would start shouting loudly in a language not one of us or the staff could understand. The lack of food then sent her into a hypo, and she was surrounded by doctors, and accompanying blazing lights . We knew that sleep for us would be out of the question. This pattern repeated itself for about four nights after which the rest of us were so sleep deprived we kept nodding off at every opportunity. Poor Sandy, who had moved into Eileen’s bed after she went home had huge black bags under her eyes. Sandy also had a view of Angela 's bed in the opposite corner; this woman cried constantly during the night and slept all day. Sandy saw her deliberately mix up jelly and ice cream to make it look as though she had been sick. We couldn’t believe anyone would do such a thing for attention; clearly she had some sort of mental health problem. It was a relief when she finally went home. Doris slept through it all. We envied her. What kept us going was our shared sense of humour. Gwen had moved into the bed next to me. She was a kind caring and gentle lady whose daughter Christine visited her devotedly on a daily basis. Christine got on well with everyone and helped all the patients when the opportunity arose. United by the night time stresses we all became quite close, though occupants of beds rarely stayed more than a week. Clearly I was the exception!