One of the most negative factors I ran into during the surgical recovery period was the danged alarms on the hardware hooked up to me. One machine was simultaneously monitoring my O2 levels and my pulse rate -- I would just be drifting off to sleep and the alarm would go off, snapping me wide awake.

On one bad day, there was a lot of stuf going on on the floor and people would come it and holler at me to Keep Breathing. Sometimes it was just that (I would be trying to concentrate on doing something and hold my breath, which of course dropped the O2). After a lot of fussing around, it turns out that my pulse drops into bradycardia (low pulse) and if the alarm threshold isn't set low enough, the danged thing would go off just as I was dropping off. Problem was that for me, the usual 'safe' zone was waaay too high.

If I do surgery again, I will be sure to discuss this with the nurses and maybe put some kind of warning tag on myself. There really wasn't much space to be hanging tags this time around because the wrist harvest site was on one side, so the IV arrangement was on the other, with the NG tube in my nose and all the cutting on my neck. Maybe an ear tag?