Welcome to modern medicine! Being in a hospital is not fun even in the best of circumstances.
I am married to a hospital chaplain, our son is a Radiologist and I was hospitalized three times last year for three different reasons so I am quite familiar with the drill. According to my son, who spends 10 hours a day reading MRIs, CT scans, etc. there is only so much detail that can be discerned even with the best technology, equipment, and training. In an area such as the spine it is not that unusual to find different conditions, worse or better, than can be seen in the radiological studies. My last cervical fusion was scheduled to take two hours and instead it took six and a half because of scaring that did not show in the MRI. The surgeon is like General Eisenhower said of the D-Day landings, "Before the battle careful planning is everything. After that battle starts it is nothing." Surgeons are not omniscient and have to deal with what they find when they actually see what is there once they get in.
Lots of hospital regulations like spelling your name or giving your date of birth to everyone coming into the room can be annoying (I began to think my d.o.b. was my real name), but mistakes do happen in a busy hospital and what is annoyingly repetitious to the patient serves several purposes, it is a double check on whether you are the right patient and how alert you are which gives an indication of your condition. Always having to call for an attendant when you go to the potty after a surgery is a real pain in the nether regions both psychologically and maybe physically, but the effects anesthesia can be tricky. In our litigious culture the doctor, nurse, and hospital will likely be sued should you slip and fall, even if you did so against medical advice, and their insurance will settle and increase the practitioner's already stratospheric insurance premiums until they are forced to leave medicine. It happens far too often.
It has occurred to me there should be a "writer's cramp" warning in the informed consent before hospitalization. What annoys me is going back to the same hospital eight weeks after being released and having to fill out all the same forms and sign all the same releases and the admissions clerk verifying what you filled out by comparing it to your data that is already in their computer! My wife had a procedure at a hospital where she had to fill out the same forms and sign the same releases in every department! and she was seen in five different departments. Apparently their departmental patient registration systems do not talk to one another. Before computerization you could simply take a photocopy of the information and drop it off at each department.
Anyway, glad you are home and doing better.
