Not even doctors are immune!

Douglas C. Weinstein’s post about ICU psychosis (a condition brought on by extended stays in the hospital) reminded me that this can happen to the best of us.
Even the best of them — and I mean the caregivers themselves.
When my father — a surgeon who obviously should have felt at home in his own hospital — had terminal cancer, he made the mistake of allowing himself to be admitted to the hospital as a patient. That was when the trouble began. While he wasn’t the least bit senile, a few days in the hospital reduced him to an utterly paranoid and disoriented state. Late one night, he could take it no more and tried to leave in his pajamas. In a most humiliating experience, this man very accustomed to giving the orders was stopped and physically restrained by hospital security guards, and prevented from leaving. Finally, he called my mom, telling her something like, “We’ve been married almost forty years, and I’ve never asked you to do anything like this, but I want you to come in here and get me out!” She did, and only with great reluctance did the guards let him leave — after he signed the form saying that he was leaving “against medical advice.” Within a day, he was back to his old, normal (if cancer-ridden) self. He only had a few months to live, but it was much more dignified at home.
He attributed his disorientation to a “morphine reaction,” but I thought there was more to it than that, because this never happened when he was on pain meds at home.
The fact is, being in the hospital is a real drag, as Glenn Reynolds confirmed in a post about his wife’s experiences:

The people at the hospital are very nice, but this leads me to wonder what would happen if you did the equivalent of those mental-hospital experiments, where normal grad students tested out as crazy after 6 weeks in a mental hospital. If you took 100 healthy people, then put them in a hospital for 2 weeks of this sort of thing and tested them again, I’ll bet that they’d be significantly worse off. People joke about the sleep interruptions, or about the bad food, but it’s really no joke when you’re in there for a while. I wonder why they don’t do better?

No matter how you look at it, being in a hospital is a profoundly unnatural experience. Even for a doctor, and if they can’t handle being patients in their own hospitals, who can?
My father’s advice at the time? “Never become a patient!”
Like me, the guy had a good sense of gallows humor.
(Hey, it outlasted the disease!)