Hospital Food
If you’re looking for a tasty meal, don’t get sick
Or injured, because really I’m of fine health, with the exception of having a severely broken leg and ankle.
FAQ: Freak accident playing soccer no contact making a quick cut heard something snap and went down screaming one surgery completed successfully at least one more to follow in a week complete bed rest two to three weeks limited mobility ~ 3 months yes it sucks but please don’t dwell on the depressing aspects of the situation because i don’t want to think about it. Thus, we’re skipping completely over a detailed description of the injury and getting right to food.
Hospital food is rarely called cuisine, and with good reason.
My first hospital meal was a turkey sandwich that boiled the genre down to its very essence: turkey lunchmeat and bread. They gave me a packet each of mayo and mustard; I used the mustard. It came with a little container of Mott’s applesauce (storebought just doesn’t compare to the real deal), some Snackwell brand vanilla sandwich cookies (fat really is flavor, these cookies had neither), and four ounces each of orange juice and cranberry juice.
The entire meal wound up all over the floor a couple of hours later under the influence of narcotic pain relievers and motion through the hospital hallways on a stretcher. I ignored the food for about 24 hours thereafter, opting instead for very small sips of ginger ale, though my wife did feed me a few spoonsfull of the broth that came with my chicken noodle soup at lunch the next day. I was surprised by how salty it was; I’d imagined hospital food to tend more toward the bland (and in many instances, it does), but in this particular case, we were to find out, the soup came straight from a can labeled “Campbell’s.”
I did a bit better with my Monday evening dinner. I ate the better part of my two fresh fruit cups, which consisted of diced cantaloupe and honeydew, plus several red seedless grapes. The melons, of course, were a bit underripe, it being the middle of November, and they likely having been shipped in from Mexico or a locale even further south. The cottage cheese was, well, cottage cheese; there’s not much you can say about that, although the prunes that came with the cottage cheese cup looked as if they had been stewed and I couldn’t bring myself to taste them. I can go for a nice dried prune (Pittsburgh readers, try the prunes available from PennMac, they’re quite tasty), but I can’t even handle the texture of a Dole prune that’s been partially rehydrated prior to being packaged, let alone one that looks all slimy and soggy-like. The side salad was iceberg lettuce with a slice of cucumber and grape tomatoes my wife reported to be immature and lacking in flavor, but I don’t know what more you’d expect in November….
I took myself off of the narcotics overnight and by morning I was somewhat more alert, with a stomach more receptive to eating. Unfortunately, I’d ordered my breakfast from a different mindset and missed out on trying pancakes or french toast; instead getting cream of wheat (which wasn’t really all that bad if you go for hot cereals, though it would have benefited from some brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, and raisins…), dry wheat toast, and a dish of applesauce. A bland diet intended to help me absorb maimum nutrition; exactly what I had wanted the night before.
By this afternoon, I was feeling better (as much so as one can feel under the circumstances) and was finally getting the hand of ordering food. My lunch was an open-faced hot roast beef sandwich with instant mashed potatoes and what were probably frozen (not canned) green beans; peaches-in-strawberry-gelatin salad, and chocolate cake. It reminded me of the better offerings one might get from a high school cafeteria. Palatable, warm, containing nutrition, though not something one would eat if offered a choice of a different dining venue. Basically, exactly what you’d expect from a hospital’s dining services, though I thought that plating the gelatin salad over a leaf of lettuce was a nice, unexpected touch.
The service was friendly and attentative, each of the two women who took my orders and delivered my meals were incredibly nice, and they helped me to find something that sounded like what I wanted. They inputed orders to a palm pilot by room and bed number, and then were able to synch the orders with a computer in the kitchen for exact meal planning purposes.
Rating: service, 3 stars; edibles, 1/2 star
April 8th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
I thought I was the only one who reviewed her hospital meals! My experience, in Central Mass, sounds like it was not as bad as yours. If you ever have to be hospitalized again, maybe it will be in Worcester!