I thought I was doing pretty well, at age 59, to have never spent the night in a hospital. That changed in a hurry for me this past summer when a CAT scan showed that I didn't have kidney stones; instead, it was good-sized tumor growing on my kidney. A couple of weeks later I was heading off to the hospital at 5:30 a.m. to have the kidney and tumor removed. My surgeon had gone over the general procedure with me and suggested I could expect to be in the hospital for three to four days. And the hospital gave me a nice little booklet about surgery, and which had a lot of good instructions for preparing for my stay.

But in the end the hospital was a whole different world from the "healthy people" world I was used to inhabiting.

I came around after surgery and found myself in my room. Family and friends and medical staff were there and even though I was still more than a little groggy I got used to my surroundings and quickly got into the hospital routine. As warned, I was really tired and slept a lot.

I'd say it was a nice room as hospital rooms go, but I don't have much to judge it against. There was a whiteboard that was updated at least every day with the names of staff who were responsible for me on each shift and also the medications, mostly painkillers, that I was getting through the ever-present IV on the left side of my bed. There was a big clock on the wall and a TV up in the corner, which was a bonus since I don't have cable at home. The hospital's cable service, however, isn't the superpremium service the cable companies advertise, but I was lucky enough to get the Food Network Channel, which I watched until they got into Cupcake Wars reruns.

I had my iPad, which was connected up through the hospital's WiFi; no password, no fuss required, just turn it on and go, which kept me connected through email and messenger and Facebook. And, I had my cell phone. The left wall of the room was all glass and looked out on a well manicured garden, which was a nice diversion. I wished that there were people in the garden walking about; instead I kept the door to my room open so I could hear people passing in the hallway.

With the iPad, phone, the TV remote, nurses station call button and my standard-issue room phone, I had a lot of devices in bed with me. It always seemed that when Food Services called to see what I wanted for breakfast the next morning, the phone they called on was the one on the table just out of reach. (I wasn't very mobile for the first couple of days, especially with the IV tether on one side and the epidural tether on the other and the multiple wires for the EGK going somewhere else.)

Then, my brother would call on my cell and that would have found its way to the chair just out of reach on the other side. Until I could get out of bed I couldn't recharge anything without a nurse’s help because my bed, which could raise, lower, tilt and swivel on three axes, didn't have a plug for my charger.

There was a lot that happened at regular intervals, including my regular nurses replenishing my IV and the Vital Signs Nurse coming every three hours to check my pulse. I started to fall into the routine. I'd try to nap and then it would be time for something. I knew that I needed the minutes to tick off and then the hours to go by and then the days to go by until it was time to go home so I'd try to nap but I'd wake up and see that only three minutes had gone by on the big clock on the wall and now it was time for three or four more things to happen at once. Someone was there to change the sheets, my nurses were replenishing the IV, dinner was being delivered and my anesthesiologist was making his rounds and checking in.

I tried to nap again and woke up to find that only six minutes had passed. When I finally mentioned it to one of my nurses they said that is was fairly common for someone in my situation to be Temporally Dislocated, which I could reasonably understand. My body had suffered the greatest trauma it ever had and I was getting quite a cocktail of drugs through my IV and otherwise.

About the third afternoon it started to hit me. Luckily I had visitors at the time, because I was starting to realize that nothing in this hospital room, nothing that was happening to me, had any relationship to anything in my non-hospital life. It was somewhere on the panic/anxiety attack spectrum; luckily, my nurse on duty, who had probably seen this many times before, had an answer. She suggested that I try taking my first walk down the hall. She rearranged and disconnected tubes and wires so I was only trailing one pole with my IV and who-knows-what-else hanging on it behind. I took a short walk and felt better, talked some more with my visitors, watched a little TV, ate dinner, watched some more TV and prepared to settle in for the night.

Sure enough the same feeling came back. I was living in a world where everything was foreign to me. By now the shifts had changed and I had my night nurse. She was,apparently, an expert at dealing with patients in this situation. Not only did she get me up and walking around, but she arranged it so I could get up by myself and walk whenever I felt I needed to.

She suggested that I might want to brush my long hair, which was starting to get matted. I told her where my hairbrush was in a bag in a sack in a box in the closet, but before I could give her further instructions she passed to box to me and said, "Here you find it."

She knew what she was doing and I realized pretty quickly, too, what she was doing in giving me a measure of control back in my life. I'm also pretty sure that’s about when she asked if I wanted chocolate pudding and I sent her off to get some. Thats another measure of control in your life when you can order up chocolate pudding at 2 a.m.

I did better after that, walking up and down the halls and sitting in a public room where I could watch the sun rise over the water, and I was discharged the next day. But I seriously wondered that if I required another stay in the hospital, whether I could bring myself to do it. I though about what I missed the most and what I might do differently next time.

I'd keep the iPad and the phone, but maybe bring an extension cord so I could keep them charged. I'd bring books, maybe even a bookshelf's worth, and magazines. The limited cable channels weren't going cut it for long. And maybe a painting from home to hang on the wall, along with a potted plant. Probably I'd be breaking every rule in the book, but I'd make sure that I had enough touches from home.

Oh, and while I was waiting to be discharged, we discovered that the big clock on the wall had a low battery and periodically would stall on one time for an extended period before jumping a half hour ahead. So much for Temporal Dislocation.