An Aspie in hospital - sleep

 I don't know about you, but I can never sleep properly in another bed. So being in a hospital bed was no exception. I didn't sleep too bad to start with despite the sensory challenges of noise and lights about me. I slept in normal beds with controls at the side in both Lewisham and King's which was OK. It was when I got to St Thomas's that I had problems. I was able to sleep on my side like I do here at home but when I was at St Thomas's I had a portable heart monitor wired to me which was connected to the monitors in the corridor outside. I was unlucky and got a faulty monitor. It kept on going wrong and the batteries kept running out, especially when I was in bed asleep. I was often woken up by a nurse asking me if I was OK as the monitor wasn't showing up. There was even a time when I was fast asleep and I was woken up about it. Yes, I was fine until you woke me up. Grr... There was a time that I slept so soundly that I didn't hear the blood transfusion IV machine beep to let me know it had either stopped or run out of battery. The lady next to me had to get out of bed and find a nurse to turn it off. I knew nothing about this until I woke up that morning.

Then I had my surgery, was in ICU (don't remember much about that, thank goodness), and moved to the High Dependency Unit. Oh my. The noise, the lights, the busyness, that bed. The strangeness of it all. I couldn't sleep at all the first few nights (more in my memoir to come). The bed was a special one that helped to prevent bed sores and went up and down under you. Not good when you have diarrhoea due to the antibiotics you are on. Oh, and yes the tubes all about me stopped me from lying on my side. I had to sit up, facing up to go to sleep. A position I wasn't used to. After the fourth night I started to doze off now and then and slept better. When I finally returned to the first ward I was in, I slept much better. No tubes, no monitors and quieter. I recovered more there as I was told I would do. 

But nothing is best than my own bed. Who agrees?