American Red Cross Text-Book on Home Hygiene and Care of the Sick by Isabel McIsaac (best large ereader TXT) 📖
- Author: Isabel McIsaac
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Usually a person's own room is more restful and less disturbing than a strange place, but if it serves as a work room as well as a bed room, it may easily be the worst place during sickness. The sight of a desk piled high with papers or a basket overflowing with accumulations of family mending may actually delay recovery; even the room itself may constantly suggest work, and work necessarily left undone. The essential thing to remember is that mental rest is no less important than physical, and every effort should be made to secure them both.
—Superfluous articles add to the care of a sick room, and in consequence they should be removed at the outset. All the furnishings that remain should be easy to clean, but it is not necessary for a sick room to look bare and desolate.
The woodwork as in any other room should have a hard finish, and angles and corners that harbor dust should be as few as possible. Hard wood floors without cracks are best from the point of view of cleanliness and convenience. A few light, washable rugs make the best floor covering, but very small rugs on highly polished floors slide easily and are decidedly dangerous. Carpets diminish noise, but are objectionable from every other point of view.
In furnishing houses people ought to realize more frequently than they do how greatly nervous fatigue may be increased by ill chosen wall coverings. Plain papers or tinted walls are best for bed rooms and the color should not be harsh or striking; soft gray, green, or buff is good. The design is no less important than the color; a design that on casual inspection appears quite harmless may become an instrument of torture to a person unable to escape from it for a single hour. Weak or nervous patients sometimes become quite exhausted from attempting to follow an intricate pattern, or from counting over and over a design that is frequently repeated on the wall. If the patient sees grotesque faces and figures in the design the paper is more objectionable still.
Necessary furniture includes the bed, which will be discussed in detail later, a small table to stand by the head of the bed, a dresser, two chairs, and a wall thermometer. If the patient is able to sit up three chairs are needed, of which one should be an armchair with a high back. No rocking chair should be allowed in the room unless the patient himself prefers to sit in one; no one else should be allowed to rock in the room, since the motion is almost always annoying to patients. Elaborate, carved, or upholstered furniture is unsuitable in a sick room, but if it must be used it should have washable covers.
Other desirable articles of furniture are a couch, screen, foot-stool and a second, larger table. In few cases, if any, is anything further really necessary, although patients frequently desire special articles to which there can be no objection.
Most ornaments add much work and little beauty, and have no place in a sick-room. No heavy unwashable curtains or hangings should be allowed, but simple washable curtains and clean white covers for the tables and dresser are desirable. Pictures, if suitable, give much pleasure, but must be used with discretion. It goes without saying that the subjects should be pleasant, but not everyone realizes that complicated subjects are undesirable and that pictures of people or things in motion should be avoided; patients are sometimes worried to see motion that is forever incomplete.
Flowers give great pleasure to the sick by adding color and variety and interest to their surroundings. They should be carefully tended and given fresh water daily. Fading flowers and forlorn plants should be removed from the sick room, and those having strong, heavy odors should not even be admitted. They do not need to be very many or very expensive; indeed, a potted plant or a few cut flowers are often more acceptable than the great masses of costly flowers that are daily brought to the private wards of hospitals.
—A patient needs fresh air certainly as much as a well person, and probably even more. His room should be thoroughly ventilated night and day. A fireplace makes the problem easier, but in most cases an open window is the main dependence. It should be possible to open windows at the top as well as at the bottom, and the patient may be protected from a direct draught by a screen, or by a sheet stretched along the side of the bed and fastened at the head and foot by tying it around the posts.
Ventilating a room without subjecting the patient to draughts is not always easy. One method is to insert a board three or four inches high under the lower sash so that air is admitted between the two sashes. Another way to ventilate without causing a draught is to remove one or two panes of glass and tack cheese cloth over the opening; or to tack cheese cloth to the lower edge of the upper window casing and to the upper edge of the upper sash, after the sash has been lowered about a foot. Once or twice a day the room should be thoroughly aired by opening windows and doors until the air has been completely changed. The patient, including his head, must be well-covered during the process. An electric fan is useful in summer, but it should not be close enough to the bed for the patient to feel air blowing upon him.
—Great care should be taken to maintain a suitable temperature in the sick-room, and for this purpose a thermometer in the room is a necessity. Between 65° and 68° is generally the best temperature, and hot water bags and extra covers may be given if the patient is chilly. During a bath or other treatment in which the patient is more or less exposed the temperature should be 70°. The temperature at night may be lower; how low will depend largely on the patient's condition and on what must be done for him during the night. Hot water, steam heat, or electricity is best for the sick room. Gas or oil stoves should never be used except in emergencies, and then for a short time only.
—Sunlight is one of the most powerful disinfectants, and for this reason if for no other it is needed in every sick room. Sunless rooms, moreover, even if they were wholesome, are too depressing to a patient's spirits for use except perhaps in hot summer days. Ordinary well-regulated light is best in a sick room, and except in a few diseases, especially those in which the eyes are affected, it is undesirable to darken the room or to encourage in any way an appearance of gloom. The patient's eyes, however, should be protected from bright lights shining directly upon them; in this connection it is well to remember that lights and their reflections strike differently upon the eyes of a person lying down from the way in which they strike the eyes of persons sitting or standing, and a light that seems agreeable to the attendant may therefore be painful to the patient.
Almost all persons sleep best in dark rooms, and in most cases it is undesirable for a sick room to be lighted at night. The attendant, however, must be able to see what she is doing and generally needs a shaded candle, small night light, or electric flash. It should be possible to see the patient clearly in case of need, otherwise serious changes in his condition occurring in the night may pass unnoticed.
A reading lamp on the bedside table is desirable for patients allowed to read, but reading in bed even with a well-regulated light is fatiguing, and should not be continued for long uninterrupted periods. A pocket flash light is safer than matches and a candle for patients who wish to consult their watches in the night; indeed, matches in the hands of patients always involve risk. Some patients find twilight a time of great depression. In such a case it had best be shortened by drawing the shades early, turning on the lights, and remembering not to leave him alone.
—The sick-room should be kept thoroughly clean at all times, and the less dust stirred up in doing so the better. Dry sweeping or dusting should not be allowed. Ordinary brooms should be dampened or covered with damp cloths, and dust cloths should be dampened also; but dustless mops and dusters are still better. Vacuum cleaning is very desirable; the noise, which is its only disadvantage, is not a serious objection in most cases. The cleaning of rooms after a communicable disease will be considered later.
A sick room must be kept tidy as well as clean. The effect of order is quieting, but it should be maintained whether the effect upon the patient is apparent or not. Food and medicine should not be kept in the sick-room, and all used dishes, tumblers, soiled linen, etc., should be removed at once. Unnecessary articles should not be found in the room at any time; every necessary article should be kept in its place, and its place should be a good one.
Maintaining order in the room does not mean that patients should be made uncomfortable. All patients, especially old people, want certain possessions within reach, and their wishes should be considered in spite of the fact that the æsthetic effect is generally far from good. For instance, a perfectly smooth bed is undesirable if in order to make it smooth the patient must be tucked in so tightly that he is uncomfortable. And it would be a mistake to remove an old man's newspapers before he has read them, even if he persists in strewing them all over the floor.
—One person and one person only should carry the entire responsibility for the patient. She should plan for him as well as care for him, should see the doctor and take the doctor's orders. Confusion and innumerable mistakes result when several members of the family attempt to do the talking and directing.
The attendant should wear washable dresses with sleeves that can be rolled up, washable aprons, and shoes with rubber heels. All her clothing should be comfortable. She should be neat in appearance, scrupulously clean in person, and should keep her finger nails short and smooth. Jewelry, especially rings and chains that rattle, and finery of any sort are all out of place in a sick-room.
The attendant must learn that her own sleep, her diet, and her out-of-door exercise are essential to the patient's well-being hardly less than to her own. An amateur nurse often considers that going without food and sleep is a proof of her devotion. In a passion of self-sacrifice she neglects herself utterly for the first few days, and as a consequence is quite useless at a later period when her services may be most needed. An exhausted, sleepy nurse, trained or untrained, is wholly unfit to be trusted with medicines and doctor's orders, to note changes in the patient's condition, or to give him kindly attention. Efficiency and fatigue have never pulled together since the world began, and no one can do good work when suffering from lack of sleep and rest.
The person, then, who genuinely wishes to give her patient the best possible care should not make a martyr of herself. She should go out of
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