My mother is my father's nurse again - for the third time in one year...

She hoped to get him a single room at the hospital he's been taken to, but they only have those (for an extra fee, of course) at Surgery Department. None at Neurology. I saw their Surgery floor a few years ago: at the common bathroom there, the sight of a woman wiping her ass with a newspaper instead of toilet paper was not unusual.

At another centrally-located Kyiv hospital (as central as it gets, actually), they used bathrooms shared by the whole floor to administer rectal exams to their male neurology patients. Also there, they almost got my father - age 73, post-stroke - climb to the third floor: not because the elevator was broken, but because the nurse didn't feel like walking over to it.

But today's ambulance nurses were very nice - three women, one big enough to lift and carry an average-sized man. My father can walk, though: he keeps trying to walk away somewhere all the time, even when there's an IV in his arm...