My surgeon wanted me to be transferred when I was ready, from that second hospital to a rehabilitation (rehab) facility before being sent home. On Tuesday, June 25th, I was transferred. At 5 AM on Wednesday, June 26th, I telephoned my doctor's office and left a message that I could not abide that place and that I absolutely MUST be sent home at once.
That evening of June 26th, there I was at home in my dining room with my wife and with everything I could possibly ask for at hand but with the thought of what another night in that rehab facility would have been like generating substantial upset.
It was a glimpse of PTSD.
There were two beds in the rehab room, but the other man there was quite out of it. There was a four foot long fluorescent light fixture above the head of my bed which had four settings of off, low, medium and high although the light levels of low and medium were the same.
When I turned that light off, the room went totally black. There couldn't have been a stray photon there. Since I had to get up now and then, total darkness in the presence of unknown objects and obstacles struck me as unsafe so that light needed to remain on.
Across the room from the foot of my bed was a television screen from which the fluorescent light reflected directly back at me. During the passage of the night, I couldn't shut out that reflective glare which gave me one nasty headache.
There was an HVAC unit that was vey noisy, especially with low frequency rumbling. As I tried to get some sleep during the night, I repeatedly woke up shivering with cold or else panting for breath in the heat.
I got up and looked at the HVAC controls and as I rotated the temperature setting knob, I could hear the compressor start or stop. The problem seemed to be that whichever side of that threshold the setting was at, the compressor stayed there way, way too long which was resulting in extreme swings of temperature.
I went along with some prescribed occupational therapy after breakfast that morning and things went well. Although I insisted on leaving and did indeed do so, perhaps to my long term recovery's detriment, the rehab environment I'd been through at night was too horrid to let be repeated.