About two weeks ago I was discharged from the intensive care unit at Ascension Hospital in Franklin. I had spent 11 days there after getting clobbered with COVID, double pneumonia, and sepsis (the body’s extreme response to an infection, a life-threatening medical emergency). Yes, I’m fortunate to be alive and am now recovering at home, slowly but nicely.

During my hellish stay at the hospital the housekeeping crew came by to clean my room all of three times. Nurses weren’t thrilled at the mounting number of un-removed bags of garbage and hospital waste.

That’s why this article caught my attention. An excerpt from the NY Post:

Hospital rooms, operating rooms and medical equipment are so inadequately cleaned that any patient going into a hospital is at risk of getting a deadly superbug. That’s true even if you’re going for the happiest reason of all, to give birth.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest data show alarming increases in the most dangerous superbugs: Acinetobacter up 78%, Candida auris up 60% and notorious MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) up 13% year over year.

When you’re a patient, which room or bed you’re put in largely determines your risk of getting infected. If the previous occupant had an infection, your danger of getting infected with the same organism goes up 583% — almost sixfold, according to Columbia School of Nursing research.

Cleaning is so shoddy that the previous patient’s germs are still lurking.

Read it all here.