Reason to be grateful!

I went out to lunch a week last and didn’t come back home for eight days!

It wasn’t the food, you understand – my lunch was excellent (and slimming) with special excellence reserved for the Tast home made tiramisu, oh, and the excellent sangria.  But basically within the limits of my regimen.  Sort of.  The real problems with the day started, or perhaps continued, when we walked from the meal to the post office to get the latest instalment in the series of archaeological books from National Geographic that was waiting for me there.

I took a few paces and had to ask for Toni to stop while I got my breath back.  This was not normal and we headed for our local medical centre.  There, because of the suggestion that my condition might be connected to the heart we were seen in super quick time and were talked to by a very personable doctor who went through the usual tests.  At the end of the series, we waited for a new prescription to be offered, but instead we were told in a matter-of-fact sort of way that I should go to hospital and that an ambulance had been called and I was placed in a waiting wheelchair.  Protocol.

There is nothing that concentrates the mind more than an immanent ride in an ambulance.  Looking out at the passing motorway and the cars and lorries on it through the semi-frosted panes of glass in the ambulance windows I had the semi-detached feeling of someone who has been suddenly placed in an oddly disorientating position of a person whose very physical stability had been called into question.

I was processed efficiently and I was soon wearing one of those terminally unflattering white cotton smocks, lying on an unnecessarily uncomfortable wheeled bed with a chest full of stuck-on electrodes.

Although I spent an uneasy night, it was as nothing compared to Toni’s night of absolute torture on a stock issue metal hospital chair!

For anyone who has been in hospital the contents of the next days will be familiar: blood tests, blood pressure readings, temperature readings, radiological tests, and on and on, day after day.  At least I progressed to a more comfortable bed!

Rather than give a daily account of my time there, I will choose a few instances of what happened and leave it at that.

“Your chest is too hairy!” remarked one radiologist who was ripping off electrodes as she spoke, and removing clumps of said hair at the same time.  Indeed, in hindsight, I would shave my chest were I to go into hospital again.  Not only is removal of the electrodes somewhat painful, but also if you have to sleep with electrodes attached (and if you are a restless sleeper as I am) then each toss and turn will dislodge a lead and fumbling to replace them is a hit and miss matter and lord alone knows what my erratic reconstruction actually did to the readings!

If your diet stipulates that it is very low fat and salt free, then most commercial eateries are going to struggle to give you something appetizing.  The soups that I was offered were generally insipid and one or two were impossible to define in terms of what they might have been made of!

The first meal that I was (eventually) given was of a series of small yellow sausages that looked, frankly odd.  I cut one of them open and I was unable to identify what the interior of those cylinders might be composed of.  I ate them.  All.  I was hungry.  But I was no nearer to identifying what I might have eaten.  They remain imprinted on my memory, though not on my taste buds.

My next evening meal was of some unidentifiable and completely tasteless white fish fillet garnished with a slice of lemon.  The lemon tasted like the smell of cheap toilet cleaner, but again, I ate it all.

I don’t want to be unfair to the hospital, these were two stand-out awful meals, the others that I had during my week’s stay (given the restrictions of my diet) were more than acceptable and they certainly made the most of the limitations that they had to work with to ensure that we had something half-way tasty to eat.  Though, I have to say, it was never more than halfway!

Meals were one way of ordering the day.  Whatever else was going on, the times of our meals was the one certainty in our ward lives.  Once one meal was finished we could start thinking about the next.  Given the tests, scans, blood taking, pressure measuring, injecting, pill popping, temperature taking and consultations, it is hardly surprising that any form of stability is more than welcome when intrusive but essential things are being done to you!

I didn’t manage to sleep for any real length of time for the first five days in hospital.  The bed that I was first put on was extraordinarily uncomfortable.  I sleep on my side and that was not a possibility on that bed of pain.  It is also very difficult to get any rest when you are linked via stick-on electrodes to a machine that bleeps, buzzes, flashes various colours and periodically inflates a blood pressure cuff.  To say nothing, of course, of the abnormally normal sounds of an emergency unit at work 24 hours a day and therefore through the night.

When I was eventually taken from the emergency unit to a four bed ward, it was quieter outside the ward but there were different noises to cope with inside.  

All of the members of our ward needed oxygen and all the ways of delivering it to individuals come with their own sound signatures.  The quietest one is the nasal feed where a tube is looped over the ears and under the nose where two small tubes jut out and into the nasal orifices.  This type just adds a low level hiss to the sound landscape.  The nose and mouth mask is louder and makes a variety of noises depending on the intensity of the oxygen flow and whether a medicinal filter had been added.  The worst form of delivery was a small portable machine with a larger diameter tube which, when turned on sounded like a jackhammer!

Then there were the noises of the men.  I know that I snore, but I didn’t have an opportunity to add my orchestral part to the nocturnal symphony of groans, shouts, wheezes and coughs that was a normal night.

The day started at some time after 6 in the morning as each patient was attended to.  One man had to be changed; another had to have his blood sugar level checked.  The lights would come on and go off again and again as the day got under way.

After a breakfast (for me) of a couple of small French toast rounds with some sort of fruit slime, together with something I have not had for over 25 years: a cup of milky instant coffee!

The most interesting test that I had was in radiography where, lying on my side with the operator’s over me so that my side was firmly lodged under her arm, I heard the actual sounds of my pumping heart and the different sounds that different parts of it made.  

And that is one of the things about being in a hospital and undergoing the probes that the doctors have to make: all that it inside is brought to the outside.  You can see the beats of your heart, you can hear the sounds it makes, you can see the force of your breath, and you can count the oxygen level of your blood.  Your internal organs become photographic images.  No part of your inside or outside is away from prying eyes!

The end of the investigation was that I had a thrombosis in my right leg, that thrombosis had probably been the cause of pulmonic embolisms that effected both my lungs and had some slight effect on my heart.  I had had, in effect, the equivalent of a heart attack but in my lungs.  I was told that it was serious and that I was lucky that it had been discovered before it was too late.

For the next six months or so I will have to alter my way of life and take things easy.  For the next two weeks I am confined to the house and I have been told to do the minimum of moving about and if I have to, to do it slowly.  

After two weeks I might be able to go for a very short walk and gradually build up my distance bit by bit.  My swimming (1,500m every day) has been terminated.  Perhaps in a couple of months I might be able to do four slow lengths of breaststroke.  I cannot use my bike.  I cannot drive the car for a couple of months.  And so it goes on.

And I don’t really feel ill!  If I take a deep breath I can tell that there is still some sort of tension, but, basically, I feel fine.  But I’m not, and I have to keep remembering that simple fact if I want to get better.  And believe me, I do!

I am very grateful for the care and attention that I received in Viladecans Hospital from doctors, nurses, orderlies, cleaners and caterers: it was exemplary and there is no doubt that their ministrations have saved my life.  

I will never forget that.