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Showing posts with label pressure stockings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pressure stockings. Show all posts

Friday, February 09, 2018

Life after hospital!

Resultado de imagen de out of hospital


It has now been a fortnight since I came out of my rather unexpected stay in hospital.  During that time I have been subjected (is that the right word I wonder?) to enforced (yes it is!) idleness.  Bodily idleness that is, where I have been encouraged to sit in my armchair and rest.  
            Going up stairs has to be done three at a time and then a pause and then the next three.  The third floor of the house has been deemed out of bounds and so has going outside.  Though I did, but that was only to let the doctor in, so I don’t think it counts as an official act of disobedience.  
Resultado de imagen de pressure stockings         During this period I have also been wearing ‘pressure stockings’ where the impossibility of my getting the damn things on, has been the daily task of Toni – after which he usually needs a sustain cup of coffee to get him back to normal.  
            Also during this period I have been injecting myself twice daily with Clexane – which I suspect is just a fancy name for some form of rat poison that is being used to thin my blood.
            Today the stockings don’t have to be worn.  I can begin to walk about a little more and I can start looking forward to a real walk to sit on a bench by the sea – which I haven’t seen for a fortnight.
             My diet has been reasonably exemplary and, to be truthful, I am getting just a tiny bit stir-crazy.
            Not that I have been staring blankly at the wall during this period, I have been busy.  Busy is a sedentary way.
            During my time in hospital I was never far from my trusty notebook in which, each day, I write thoughts banal and halfway original in the hope that some of them might be the basis for a poem in the future.
            As I had never stayed in hospital before, I reasoned that it had to be the stuff of some sort of writing and I therefore wrote daily about what was happening and tried to sketch out my feelings and observations. 
            Reading over my notes and responses, the one thing that leaps out from the pages is not my fear about what was happening to me, but rather the composition of the meals that the hospital offered.  Each lunch and dinner is lovingly and compulsively detailed together with my evaluation, reflecting perhaps a natural obsession for those caught up in the institution of healing!
            Obviously, I do also comment on how I was living and what was done to me: the blood tests, the scans, the daily routines of blood pressure, temperature etc., the injections and drips, the oxygen masks, the smocks, the toilets, the showers, the structure of the day, the different people who came in and out of the ward.  It was all new, and at the same time, from past visits, from television shows, documentaries, friends’ explanations, and general knowledge, quite old as well.  The key difference was that I was the patient rather than the observer; the person things were happening to rather than the general landscape of ‘other’.
            As I began to work through my notebook I discovered some aspects that suggested poems at once, but there were other areas of experience that seemed to be better suited to prose, so I worked on the basis that what I was going to produce would be better suited to a mixture rather than being a ‘pure’ chapbook of poetry.  I also did some ‘drawings’/doodles while I was in hospital and, if I ever find a way of getting them from my reMarkable electronic tablet and into my computer I will be adding those to the mix!
            The working title of the chapbook is “A Point of Blue”, a reference to one of the completed poems based on the scrap of sky that I could see from my bedside chair alongside bed 13.2 next to the window in the ward, but I also like the ambiguity that the title holds as well.  An uninspiring view that ironically inspired me to write!
            I have a draft of the book that is almost ready: I have one more prose piece to write and get the ‘drawings’ in place and it will be ready for publication.  I also have a photo of me resplendent in smock and oxygen mask that I will consider for the dedication page perhaps!
            Now to make publication a reality!