Patients in a section of the Queensway-Carleton Hospital are being offered ear protectors to drown out the sound of jack-hammering. The hospital is under construction and with beds at capacity and even over-capacity, closing the ward just isn't an option.The section under construction at the Queensway-Carleton was built in 1976, some 40 years ago.

A hospital is typically a quiet environment, a place to heal from an illness or surgery.  But one patient says that the constant jackhammering was so bad, it was making him sicker. Kevin Garraway is glad to be home and glad, too, to be out of the hospital after a four day stay last week. 

“My appendix burst,” he explains.  He first went to the Carleton Place hospital, and then ended up at the Queensway-Carleton for surgery.  He can't say enough about the care he received there but he's got a lot to say about the noise.

“They had the jackhammering going on from 7:15 a.m. to about 4:15 or 4:30, all day long,” Garraway says, “It was quite unbearable.”

So unbearable, a friend recorded video of him trying to sleep, with ear protectors on.  

The friend even used a decibel reader.  It hit 85 inside his room.

“It was giving me a migraine,” he says, “and lots of headaches. I was on Tylenol every four hours.  It was driving me crazy.”

The ear protectors are provided to both patients and staff on ward C-3, while it undergoes some much-needed renovations. 

Tammy Hirkala is the Unit Manager and carries her ear protectors around with her.

“It's not an easy job at best to be a nurse in a busy unit like this,” she says, “but we're coping pretty well and we know the end result is something to look forward to so we're looking for light at end of tunnel.”

Just as she finishes her sentence, the jackhammering starts up.

“That’s just a little taste for you,” she jokes, “There you go.”

The noise is coming from the floor above C-3. When the Queensway-Carleton built a unit for the acute care of the elderly, it freed up the space on the fourth floor for the hospital to renovate.  That space is 40 years old, and as Lianne Learmonth, the director of patient care explains, in need of updating to improve patient safety.

“There’s no space in the room for equipment,” she says, “In the bathrooms especially, there’s no room for a wheelchair or a nurse to help patients.”  

Moving patients out of the space below that floor wasn't an option.

“We're very cognizant of the strain we're putting on patients,” Learmonth says, “We don't have the luxury of closing beds to be able to do the renovations so we are trying to work around them.  We’re careful with patients who might be palliative or have behavioral problems or dementia, so we are not putting them in this unit and we have worked with smaller hospitals in Almonte and Carleton Place to move some patients there. But with flu season coming, we don’t have the luxury of opening any other beds in any other part of the building.”

Kevin Gallaway says he understands the need to renovate the old building but said, by Thursday, he was done.

“I said to the nurse, that's it, do what you need to do to prep me to go home,” he says, “I'm out of here.”

The hospital says the jackhammering should end by next week.  It's affecting about 35 patients. That's the good news.  The bad news is that it will move to a different part of the hospital whenthat section is renovated. In all, three units will be renovated over a period of about two years.