Eve was finally moved to her hospital room at 8:30pm that night. It was a private room, and nicely painted and colored. The bathroom was very nice. This was good.

This was when the battle for the heating pad started up.

The first nurse saw how much the heating pad was helping us, so she forwarded a request down to their building management to ask whether the heating pad could be inspected for compliance with government regulations. We all knew this would be refused. Electric coil heating pads caused fires! Didn't everyone know that? I hear on the news constantly...well, sometimes...ummm, well, never. Oh well. Through that nurse we were having the bureaucracy buy us some time. And hospitals are 99% bureaucracy, 1% care. Unfortunately, we didn't see that nurse ever again.

I, of course, stayed with Eve all 5 nights that she was there. The thought of leaving her there was insane. Really, it would have been utterly 'insane'. Completely oblivious to reality. Head Nurse Jacki did not like this at all, however, and several times tried to pressure Eve into telling me to go home. I can't understand this, actually. Hospital rules and regulations encourage people to stay. Average response time to Nurse calls was 45 minutes! The nurses were horribly overworked (or just incredibly lazy. Maybe both). I was the one who took care of Eve. She needed help constantly, and when she did, she needed it immediately! (Colon infections causes certain...things...to operate out of your control) I can only conclude that Nurse Jacki was, in fact, insane.

Now you'd never be able to tell from our house, but Eve actually was a neat-freak. At least about germs. Most of the hospitals attempts to keep things clean and disinfected were actually quite nice. However, there were exceptions, and these freaked Eve out when encountered. The rolling table by the bed had a gooey yellow substance under it that Eve sank a finger into once. A new bedsheet was put onto her bed at one point that dispersed brown leafs/flakes from its folds over her bed (we have a guess at what this was, but I hesitate to mention it). Toilet specimens were trapped and taken at intervals, but then the trap was cleaned in the bathroom sink and reinstalled without the sink being disinfected again. The slippers that the hospital provided were nice, but these were always thrown out after use because Eve didn't trust how they were cleaning up the floor.