The hospital roommate chronicle

One of my other roommates was a guy named "Ralph". I was in the hospital for months and I had roommates that had shorter hospital stays than mine. There was some turnover.

Ralph was an amputee. He lost part of his leg due to diabetes. I ran across a number of guys during my stay that lost part of their leg due to diabetes.

He had a low opinion of women. He had told me after one nurse had left the room after making her rounds that no woman was going to tell him what to do. I asked if he realized that the vast majority of the nursing staff were women. I did not get a response. He had a number of run-ins with nurses.

We had bit of an adversarial relationship. He was there for some rehab on his leg for a few weeks, then would be sent home, then slated to return a few months later for a fitting for a prosthetic leg. I was intent on quietly doing my time until I could get well enough to be discharged. He would decide to hurl occasional insults at me because he enjoyed it. Then at times he sincerely wanted to be my friend and have a decent conversation.

If you are familiar with hospital rooms they usually have a tray-like table on wheel for your bed. I had a cell phone and an iPad. There was no working television in most of the rooms but there was free wifi which kept the inmates sane. Ralph had a cell phone and a laptop. He kept his laptop on his table.

A lot of guys had urinals to use as some of them had difficulty getting to a washroom or could not use a washroom. Ralph would use one during the night when he had to. He usually placed the urinal when he was done on the bedside table.

One morning I woke up before five in the morning because my roommate was yelling and cursing. I asked him what the problem was. He had woke up, bounced around in his bed to get comfortable, and while moving his arms grabbing covers he managed to knock over his partially full urinal dumping the contents onto his laptop keyboard.

I hit the call button for a nurse. He angrily asked me why I called a nurse. I told him he is going to need some help saving his laptop and cleaning up the mess. Everything got cleaned up and amazingly enough his laptop suffered no ill effects.