It's a great
leveler. It doesn't care whether you're rich or poor, what you believe or
where you're from. The hospital gown is short on modesty, but long on
convenience for the hospital staff. It's design is purely convenience, and this is the unfortunate reality for a patient's humility. As Marketing
Profs say,
"The hospital gown has been around for centuries. It’s
no news that the ill-fitting, dignity-stealing flimsy covering clearly needs an
overhaul."
"The
traditional American hospital gown -- flimsy in front, open to the breeze in
the back -- has been around about as long as the Band-Aid. If anything, it has
changed less."
With you in a hospital gown, the doctors and nurses can pick, poke and prod, examine your vital signs, and get right to surgery if that's what you need. Friday
morning, I was in a hospital to have a kidney stone procedure, but the hospital
gown neither knew that or cared. To anyone else not connected to my care,
I was just another hospital patient.
After
checking in and being brought to the nurse's station at the ambulatory care
center, I was directed to room 6, and told to take off all my clothing and get
into the hospital gown that was handed to me.
Room
6 turned out to be more of an alcove with a curtain that could be drawn across
the opening to the hall. I put on the hospital gown and waited for the
next piece of hospital business. Sitting in a hospital gown I looked like
every other patient. Of course, we all retained our physical features, but we shared the same garb, the great leveler, the hospital gown.
Blanton Godfrey, dean of the College of Textiles of North Carolina State University is quoted in the Wall Street Journal article, saying "It is amazing -- we have created a product nobody likes." The college is working on new designs with $250,000 of funding from the Robert Wood Johnson of Princeton, NJ.
Did you know that the hospital gown market in America is a $76 million enterprise? For something nobody likes.
The size of that market has attracted not only the attention of a college in North Carolina and a foundation in New Jersey. Designer Nicole Miller has gotten into the act, as have others. There are even designer gowns for men, although they are promoted as "luxury gowns."
A few minutes later after changing into my hospital gown, I was taken by wheelchair for an x-ray. I said that I
could walk, but I guess they didn't want my rear end peaking out of the gown on
the way to the x-ray department. So, I was seated in the wheelchair and pushed
there. I sat in the hall for about 20 minutes while they prepared the
x-ray machine for its first patient of the morning.
It's
a bit humbling to be sitting in a wheelchair in a hallway wearing nothing but a hospital gown. Medical personnel walk past, people in normal clothing walk past,
everyone has somewhere else to go, and meanwhile, there I sat. I could
hear some mechanical sounds behind the door to x-ray room 2, and every once in
a while someone would come out of another door and report that they were
getting ready for me.
After
the x-ray, I was wheeled back to room 6. I signed some papers, was hooked
up to an I-V, was visited by the anesthesiologist and my doctor, sedated
and then wheeled on a gurney to the operating room. The last few details
I tell you what I was told; I was knocked out until about noon.
When
I woke up in the recovery room, I was laying face-up on the gurney, facing the
wall. The most prominent item in my view was a monitor with blue, green,
and yellow lights. Every so often an orange blinking light would
come on and I was told by a nurse to breath deeply. As I did so, the
light would go out.
As I waited, I
was told that my next destination was being prepared for my arrival.
A nurse finally did come and started unhooking me from the various lines
that fed into the monitor.
I
was transported again, this time in another wheelchair, to another room 6 in the ambulatory care center of the medical facility.
In room 6, I was seated in a standard issue hospital reclining chair, still
hooked up to the I-V that was attached to my arm at about 7:30 that morning.
I was permitted to change out of the hospital gown.
As
long as you're in a hospital you're as much a property of the hospital as the
gown. At least if feels that way. It felt almost like I was back in
the Army. Fortunately, my enlistment in the hospital was a few hours
rather than three years.
