ICU Day 35 - Beeping, Lots of Beeping

I'm aware that sleep deprivation is a tactic used on prisoners of war to break them down.  Someone should consider locking these folks up in an ICU for 30+ days as an effective means of altering their mental state.  Last night I spent the night in the hospital room with Shirley. Something I've only done three times while she's been in the ICU.  I find it remarkable that anyone can get any rest in a place like this--and that's with a modified regime where they are only coming in a couple times a night to take her vitals.

The thing that drives me nuts is all the beeping.  Everything has alarms and they go off for all kinds of reasons:

• The monitor of her vitals signs will go off in both a yellow or red state if she goes above or below set levels.  They are monitoring her heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate and oxygen saturation.  She kicks off the BP alerts a few times a day as she reaches the furthest times from her Metoprorol dosing, but the oxygen saturation alert goes off often. The probe used to check her sats goes on a finger, toe or ear lobe and is constantly needing to be adjusted.  Her extremities go from very warm to freezing cold and when they get cold, or if they are bumped, you don't get a good reading and false alerts go off.
• Her ventilator monitors her respiration rate as well. It also tracks lung pressure and volumes on inhaled and exhaled air.  The alerts on this monitor and louder than any other.  When Shirley sleeps, sometimes her breaths become too shallow and she will set off an alert for too low for exhalations.  The alarm kind of wakes her up and usually after two or three times of the beeping, she is awake enough that she resumes normal breathing volumes.  This morning, she kicked this alarm off eight times between 5:10 and 6:30 am.  While this loud alarm is useful to her when her volumes get low, when she gets stressed, she will begin breathing too fast.  Once her respiration rate gets above 40, the same loud obnoxious alert goes off--triggering more stressful fast breathing.  There is an override button on the monitor that will silence it for two minutes--usually enough time to get her breathing calmed back down.
• There is a master control unit for her IV pumps.  It has a shrill quick beeping that sounds when the line is occluded; when there is air in the line; when a scheduled dose is completing or -- if the unit gets unplugged -- when the battery needs charging.  Shirley is currently only using one IV pump for some antibiotics, so this one doesn't go off all that often anymore, but at the peak of her illness, she had 11 different IVs going in through three master controls and it was a nearly constant chirping of these alerts.
• Likewise, her feeding tube has a pump.  Perhaps the most pleasant sounding of the chirps, this one goes off to alert if bag of nutrition formula is near empty, if the line becomes blocked, if the scheduled feeding volume has been reached or if the battery needs recharging.
• And finally, the bed itself.  There are brakes on the bed to keep it in place.  Whenever they are released to move the bed, it sounds like a truck backing up.  There is also an alarm on the unit that serves as both the TV control and the nurse call light.  In the event of a real emergency, you can yank the cord out of the wall and it sets off alarms in the hallway that send a team of people running to the room.  This has never been used intentionally in Shirley's room, but the cord hang from the ceiling and about once a week gets pulled just enough to sound the alarm.

All of this leads to days and nights filled with electronic chirping and not much rest.

Plans for the move to Regional Hospital have been solidified and the move will take place on Friday. The ambulance is coming at 11 am to pick Shirley up.