Hospital, heal thyself: patients need sleep.

A couple of years back, I spent a right good long time in the hospital.

Three weeks. At the holidays.

I wasn't sick, but I was staying with my very sick son, who had suffered peritonitis with complications from a ruptured appendix.

I wasn't sick, and that was a good thing and a bad thing.

The good part is that I was able to help care for and advocate for my son. (At one point, when he suffered something like a seizure in reaction to a drug, I adamantly refused to let him be treated as if he were epileptic. I had seen an epileptic seizure before, and I knew he was not having one.) The bad part was that he got sleeping pills, and I didn't. So I became a veg from lack of sleep.

Recently I came across interesting study of hospital conditions by a team of nurses at the Mayo Clinic. It found that patients have difficulty sleeping in the hospital, and discussed why. The researchers reported that after surgery many patients experienced disturbing noise levels--sometimes seeming as loud as a jackhammer.

"Adequate sleep is important to the healing process." lead author Cheryl Cmiel wrote, "And sleeping in the hospital is notoriously difficult."

Noise peaked at roughly 113 decibels, the report found, and came from a variety of sources: moving staff reports during shift changes, replacing supplies, tests administered in the middle of the night, flipping on all the lights to check on patients.

During our long stay in the hospital, my young son was so weak he usually fell back to sleep after a troop of doctors and students arrived at 6 a.m. for an exam, speaking in voices suitable to a lecture hall, asking questions and fielding answers. I was never so lucky.

When nurses or docs threw a metal chart onto the foot of the metal bed or into a hard plastic receptacle outside the door, it was unsettling. When the overhead lights flashed on at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. or whatever time happened to be convenient for the overnight staff to do an X-ray or a series of blood draws, sleep was over for the rest of the night for me--as it was when someone on the night shift celebrated a birthday, got engaged or found something hysterically funny and spent the evening howling about it at the desk just outside the room where my son slept in a bed and I slept on a cot.

The Mayo nurses' report may change that. (With great respect to doctors, I have always felt nurses were the ones who seem to figure out most things related to day-to-day patient survival, mental and otherwise. This study bears that out.) It suggests a few changes so startlingly easy and inexpensive that it boggles the mind that no one thought of them before. Among them are:

* Moving staff reports at shift changes to an enclosed room instead of the nurses' desk, thus cutting off the volume of voices.

* Replacing noisy roll-type towel dispensers with silent folded towels.

* Putting a coating of foam rubber padding on the chart holders outside patient rooms to avoid that CLANG when the reports are removed or replaced.

* Closing the doors to patient rooms.

* Changing the times for test-taking from. say, 3 a.m. to 10 p.m.

* Using flashlights to check patients' vital signs instead of turning on all the overhead lights without any warning.

* Helping staff to understand that even though they're awake, the patients aren't.

And, I guess it's natural to say, trust nurses to come up with a plan that can make a stay in the hospital easier to endure--both by the patient and the person holding the patient's hand.

Jacquelyn Mitchard is a syndicated columnist and author of "Deep End of the Ocean. ""