The Doctor Calls

My daily cup of Earl Grey and my morning injection over, I have the rest of the day to consider and plan.

I have found that, much like my time in hospital, meals now occupy much of my thought and structure my day.  Toni is discovering new skills as he produces the low fat and salt-free meals that I am supposed to eat, and I have to say that he is showing surprising aptitude in producing tasty food that I wolf down with alacrity.

Although I am eating healthily, my enforced lack of exercise does not allow my body to take full advantage of the calorie denial that it is going through.  I am hoping that, after another week, my ability to go for short walks will add at least some exercise to my sedentary existence at the moment and encourage my weight loss.

Perhaps the most significant event today will be A Visit By The Doctor.  The capitalisation is essential in this day and age when such a thing is not exactly the norm.  I seem to remember when a child and going through the usual round of illnesses that a doctor’s visit was a sort of physical affirmation of the medical rites of passage as measles and mumps and the like were ticked off the list!

I have made a list of questions for the doctor.  This approach is a direct result of my mother’s experience when she was ill.  She found that the Bedside Manner that some doctors had precluded significant questions and at the end of her time with them, she was able to recollect later that important points had not been covered.  Not one to suffer fools gladly (especially when she had been hoodwinked by technique) my mother wrote out what she wanted to know before hand and doggedly stuck to her points (rather than the doctor’s waffle) and sometimes cut through pleasantries to ask the next question!

One head teacher in my experience had the ‘deflection through mutual intellectual conversation’ down to a T, and I recall leaving his office with a smile of satisfaction on my face, but no extra money in the Faculty.  It’s a good trick if you can master it.

Anyway, thrombosis, embolism and dickey heart are not elements that are made better by ‘a smile of satisfaction’ but rather by concrete changes in attitude and life style.  I need to know exactly what I need to do to get back to where I was.  And indeed if it is possible to get there.  I need hard facts or clear details about what has happened to me and how I can change or work with what is going on with my body.

It is easy to feel positive because mine is a no obvious pain condition, but that in itself, is something that can be a false positive.  After the horror stories related to me by the doctor in the hospital of the fatal results of not following the guidelines for recuperation, I am satisfactorily unsettled.  I now need to know how to put that unease to good use so that I can progress to . . . to wherever I am reasonably able to go!  With Toni’s eagle eye watching for any tea-related backsliding, I have the incentive to extend this period of abstinence from my usual caffeine and fat related diet and make a steady improvement.  We shall see.

My poetry progresses slowly and haltingly.  Perhaps one of the reason for this is that, since I have returned from hospital, I have not been writing in my notebook each day.  My notebook is for ‘ideas’ that can be worked on later.  Usually I write in this after my swim and while I am having my cup of tea in the leisure centre café.  The ‘notes’ that I make are usually of a truly banal nature concerning the weather or some trivial details of my daily life, but the point of always keeping a notebook is that sometimes these quotidian remarks develop into something more significant, or, almost in spite of myself, I find a phrase or a sentence that prompts some other writing.

Another element, just at important as the creative, in my notebook is as a jolt or reminder of action that needs to be taken.  Sometimes I have gone as far as to write a signed and dated note to myself, agreeing (with myself) to get something done by a particular date!  Having written it down in a book, it is a constant reminder of those things that, in my case I have not done (and there is no health in me!) – ah, the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer are never too far from my way of expression!  And generally speaking they work, my little aide memoires.  Because when you really want to do what you have not done, all it takes is the slightest hint to actually get it started!

The doctor has called and my conversation with him was both better and worse than I expected.

He said that I can re-join the normal life of my fellow humans at the end of this week, when short walks and drives will be acceptable and I will be able to get out of the house for the first time.  Well, that’s not strictly true as the doctor arrived when Toni was scouring pharmacies to find more of the Clexana injections that I take.  Apparently these are in short supply, though god knows why as they seem to be the bog standard treatment for thinning the blood to treat thrombosis and embolism.

Anyway, the doctor said that they don’t really know why the thrombosis in my right leg formed and they were still studying the blood tests to see if there is anything that might give a clue.  They will also be checking my heart after the extra work that it had to do to cope with the thrombosis as that might be damaged as well.  The course of injections I am taking will last for six or twelve months, maybe longer.  Although there is a chance that I will fully recover, that chance is qualified by what may be found out further.  It may be that the damage to heart and lungs is permanent, but that is taking the most pessimistic view.  Which I, resoundingly, refuse to accept.  At least until further evidence to the contrary is shown.

I also asked about tea.  When I asked the doctor looked at me quizzically and said that I could drink tea.  I then pressed him by asking how many cups of tea I could drink.  To which his response was, “What sort of question is that?” to which I replied, “Yours is one only a foreigner would ask!”  At least he laughed and said, “I’m not going to worry about a cup of dirty water!”  Dirty water!  Only a lesser breed without the law would refer to Earl Grey as dirty water!

So, although I am going to be able to do the simple things in life a little earlier than I expected, the long-term problems are still to be discovered.  For example, when I asked about my present low far/no salt diet and how long it would last, the reply was, “For ever!”  Ah well!

My next doctor’s appointment is in three weeks time and then in March I have two tests back in the hospital to see what progress, if any, has been made.

At least I will be able to drive myself there!  I hope!

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.

Verbs and worse!

The number of tenses we, in our Spanish class, are supposed to know has now reached some form of critical mass.  God knows, I am unsure enough of the names for tenses in English let alone in a foreign language.  And let me tell you that you cannot be as sloppy in the formation of tenses in Spanish as you can in English.  You have to be exact.  Verb endings indicate who or what is happening without the use of pronouns.  So your listeners can tell.  Or, of course, not.

Well, we have recently had a test.  A written test.  I experienced some sort of brain freeze when I took this one and what little knowledge I had of various verb endings fled from my consciousness like die-hard Conservatives from social justice!

The reality of the disaster of the test was not the worst of my fears.  Our teacher goes in for what you could call refreshing honesty or horrific public denunciation.  During one soul-searing lesson last year it rapidly became apparent that she was going to read out our results openly for the rest of the class to hear.  As there were fewer verbs involved in that debacle I had more chance of passing, but it was a damn near thing!

This time I thought that the “revelations” of ineptitude were going to be confined to a rapid distribution and collection of our finished papers just before we disappeared for the weekend.  I gazed at my paper in blank incomprehension (in much the same way in which I wrote it) and handed it back in, relieved that the humiliation was personal and private.

Imagine my horror today when I saw the pile of papers reappear on the desk of the teacher.  My horror increased as the teacher berated us (yet again) for failing to use accents on interrogatives.  This, we were told, was basic.  We did it last year.  It is something that we MUST know.  She then singled out a selection of students, by name, and asked them why the accents had been omitted!  Wearing an expression of what I hoped was optimistic contrition I gazed at the teacher and waited for the Name of Shame to pinned to my shrinking confidence.  As I knew that in past tests I had used French words rather than their Spanish equivalents, and that my use of accents was always more impressionistic than accurate that the raised eyebrow of pedagogic incredulity would arch in my direction.

But it didn’t.  My paper was given back without condemnation!  I know that in a perfect narrative world, I would now be telling you that in fact I got one of the highest marks in the class and silly me for ever doubting my linguistic ability.  Alas, this is and was not the case.

I looked through my paper and whole sections had the mark that the British Eurovision song entry gets from the more unfashionable fragments of the late empire of the USSR.  I had however managed to garner unexpected marks though luck rather than ability and my written prose piece was enough to get me a scrape-by pass.  I said nothing and showed my paper to nobody and have resolved to Get To Grips With Verbs.

I do have a plan.  Of sorts.  It amounts to cobbling together information from a selection of books that I have in a final attempt to get the forms into my head.

I have to admit that sometimes the circumstances in which you use these Spanish verbs sounds like a selection from the screenplay of The Paleface, starring the right wing, yet supremely talented, Bob Hope.  I mean that bit in the film where he (a confirmed townie) is given advice when he goes out to take on the gunslinger in the Wild West.  Eventually all the advice gets mixed up and he mutters to himself a Surrealistic amalgam of the helpful hints. 

Well, it’s the same thing with verbs.  If you are an English speaker then you will usually find that, after having spoken, you will have had not a moment’s difficulty in being able to have used the most complicated verb formations in normal conversation.  Rather like the grammatical form of that last sentence, whose translation into Spanish is not something I can contemplate with any degree of equanimity.

I swear that we recently had an explanation given to us in Spanish about the use of one of the past tenses which went something like this: “This is the tense that you use for something in the past which happened before something else and which was an action completed in the past but not in the distant past.”  I admit that I might be making some of that up, but I am not making this one up, I am copying it from a text book: “This tense is used for an action or state of being that occurred in the past and lasted for a certain length of time prior to another past action.”  [Their italics]  I mean what chance do I have!

Whinging, however will decline no verbs, so the Desperate Plan for Linguistic Fluency must / has to / will have to / be put in place with some dispatch - or at least before the next test so that I can boost my overall mark!  We were also told today that our particular examination has a pass mark of 65% and not the lowly 40% that we have been working with heretofore.

Something to think about.

As indeed is the continuing situation of chaos in Catalonia.

On Saturday I went into Barcelona and joined a million people protesting about the imprisonment of political prisoners created by the government of Rajoy and PP (the systemically corrupt party he “heads”(sic.)

Rajoy reminds me of the late and completely unlamented Dr. (sic.) Ian Paisley.  Like that reverend bigot the only word that Rajoy seems to favour is “No!”  Rajoy’s idea of conciliation is police violence.  How much the barbaric police “action” cost during the election in Catalonia on October 1^st has now been declared a “State Secret”.  I wonder why?  Rajoy referred to the President of Catalonia as a liar as his way of encouraging dialogue, Rajoy’s speech is always in absolutes, and there is no room for compromise unless the other side capitulates entirely.

Even the Brexiteer liars in Britain seem to be amenable to some sort of compromise; perhaps they could talk to their sister party in Spain and get them to recognize that politics is the art of the possible!

Probably not.

Never mind, I can always turn to the Imperfecto de Indicativo or the Pretérito or even the Pluscamperfecto de subjunctivo to take my mind off it all!

Alternatively there is the second volume of the third level Art course in the Open University to read that arrived this afternoon - and that that book has pretty pictures in it too!  And let’s face it who could seriously turn away from a volume entitled, “Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600-1800”?  I for one certainly can’t.