Restoring human dignity in the hospital

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."

Even the Wall Street Journal has chimed in:

"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.