Being stuck in hospital

Nobody ever seems to think of the parents when you're stuck in hospital, rightly so your sick child is more important, but you exist as a human too.

Being a single parent I am there the whole time my daughter is, which is a lot!
Since birth we've totalled many, many months inside, stuck often in windowless wards, not knowing what time of the day or night it is.

I haven't come across a ward that feeds parents yet, I take big bags of food for myself, and Stargirl isn't a fan of the hospital food either so I take stuff for her too.

A lot of wards forget the parent exists and that we have basic everyday needs like eating, sleeping and needing the bathroom.

We are there, with our child, worried about them, all parental decisions almost are removed from us; the doctors decide and their choice is final!
We are given tiny beds that sometimes aren't near enough to our kids who are upset and sick, and are woken very often through the night for them to do their checks, or to administer medicine, and then are left consoling our poor babies who've been horribly woken from their slumber after spending ages trying to get them to fall asleep somewhere noisy and new.

And then there's bathrooms, in our homes we leave our children playing in our living rooms, or take them with us on clingy days. In hospital neither of those apply when you need to go, toilets for parents are often far away, and we have to leave them in their beds if they are hooked up to machines.

The last few months we've spent time on a ward that had one toilet, that was very, very far away off the ward, that 60, yes 60 parents had to share. It was horrendous! Having to queue, worrying about Stargirl was awful, sometimes you'd be queuing for 30+ minutes to get in there, sometimes even more!!

I don't know how to begin raising awareness of this for hospitals, the more relaxed a parent feels and the more amenities close by, then the easier it is for the millions of us that spend time in hospitals each year.
Nobody likes being in hospital, but being in there when you're healthy and well is hard, we drop everything in our normal everyday lives for days/weeks/months or more to stay in vented air rooms, full of strangers sleeping feet away, whilst we worry about our children and any children stuck at home when you're a parent to more than one.

I think and hope that one day children's hospitals will be nicer, and better planned, they're the only wards where you have well adults also staying, adults that are scared, and worried, and just want to take their babies home.