I spent last Tuesday in the hospital.  When i went to bed around 10:30, I had a room to myself with a large reclining chair next to it.  Around midnight I awoke to see a man wheeled in on a bed next to me, sharing the two person room.  He turned his t.v. on softly, and i fell back asleep.

the friggin t.v. never turned off after that.

In the morning, the volume was raised to what i will call a medium volume.  This is a 8am.  Unfortunately, the way the tv came off the wall, it was turned so that the speakers faced the adjacent wall, and therefore, me.  He slept with it on at full volume.  Slept with it on full volume.  To me and my mother and later my gf, it became a water torture of sorts.  Just a constant noise, not allowing us one moment of silence.

And i understand that people get lonely, but also understand that he didn't turn the volume down when there were important phone calls or when doctors were visiting our room.  We had to ask him a number of times to turn it down.  Which he did.  And then he turned it back up.  And then he would nap.

I almost lost my cool.

And he was watching such crap from all over the map.  We are talking old reruns of Bonanza to Saved By the Bell.  At one point, he was even using the hospital phone to follow up on an infomercial he saw on the tv for a new blood sugar monitor it thought he could receive for free.  Pretty decent blog material, but at the time i just wanted a few moments of peace and quiet. 

In the end, i try and remember that when i left him, he was alone, with only his tv as company.