Category: Health
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Abducted by aliens
Abstract: Anally probed with a four metre long tube. Tags: alien, abduction, colonoscopy, humour, personal
Last week I was abducted by aliens.
I was woken at dawn by my alarm clock to find a bright light shining in through the window. As if in a trance, I found myself drawn towards the light and compulsively (as I do every morning) drew the curtains.
I felt a presence in the room.
‘Turn your alarm off, for God’s sake!’ said my wife.
I felt a non-human presence in the room.
‘Miaow’ said the cat.
I found myself getting washed and dressed and heading out the door, as if I had an appointment to be somewhere. After a brisk twenty minute walk, I found myself right inside the massive, shiny metallic spacecraft, which appeared to have landed slap bang in the middle of a car park. I felt no fear, although I was a little apprehensive. I entered the craft and was transported up into its upper level via some kind of elevator.
I have blogged before about my experiences of abduction and how aliens harvested my organs and tortured me, so this was nothing new. I felt a familiar apprehension as I caught sight of one of my abductors, a short woman in a green uniform.
‘Would you like an enema before we start?’ she asked. ‘A glass of water would be nice,’ I replied. ‘Do you need to go?’ she asked me rather sternly this time. ‘Well, I’d like to be back in time for the football.’ Now in something of a huff, she handed me a green paper gown to wear, which appeared to have been designed for tailed creatures. I followed her through to what looked like an operating theatre where I was surrounded by three little green men with surgical implements and machines which went ‘BLEEP!’.
They made me lie on a table and paralysed me by injecting something into my hand. One of the aliens stuck his finger up my back passage and said, ‘This might hurt a little bit.’ Then they made me pass out by gassing me. I awoke sometime later to find the aliens withdrawing a four metre long tube from my rear end. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I didn’t feel a thing.’ I was as high as a kite. They handed me back to my wife on a piece of string and told her, ‘Don’t let go of him.’
Somewhat bizarrely, they also gave me a piece of paper describing the contents of my colon - nothing at all in there save a few pesky piles.
What a bloody relief!
Twenty Ten (The Prequel): The Cheesemaker
Originally intended as a follow-up to part one of my milk-based food product styled personal review of 2010, this post quickly regressed into a metaphorical guide to the cheesemaking process, as you will see.
By the end of the first week of March 2010, I felt like I was several thousand feet above sea level. High up a mountain, again, perhaps mostly due to the ever-decreasing capacity of my right lung, but plummeting to new emotional depths thanks to the leaden weights of my ever-increasing self-doubt and sense of despair, perhaps partly as a reaction to stopping taking my antidepressant medication (although I stopped because I was feeling worse, not better).
One of the problems I found with officially going a bit mental is that I started to lose all confidence and trust in myself and the rest of the world. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve always been a bit of an independent-minded so-and-so and generally not afraid to say out loud whatever comes into my head. This invariably leads to me getting punched in the face. Or some other non-violent conflict.
The Big Cheese
A few years ago, I worked for someone who was responsible for making the lives of a few of her staff abjectly miserable, quite contrary to our organisation’s stated raison d’être ‘for better mental health.’ It appeared that she would move from one person to another and to another and then, it seemed to me, it was my turn. I decided I wasn’t going to take it.
During a torrid six months as her primary target, I had to undergo hospital tests on my heart for still unexplained and not since repeated vomiting and blackouts. When I told my GP what was going on at work she immediately signed me off with stress and didn’t want me to go back when I did. By the time my boss had finished with me I was unemployed and unemployable. Never underestimate the power of a bully.
I learned from painful experience quite a lot about how bullies and psychopaths operate. I learned that, while part of me wants to stand up to them and expose them for what they are, the sane part of me wants to avoid them altogether. So when I did manage to find a new job with a decent manager and then moved on from that with a good reference into my current post four years ago, I was delighted to be in a position where I was ’the boss’, although, of course, I still had to report to a management committee made up of volunteers, led by a truly wonderful Chair.
When I say I was glad to be in charge, I don’t say that because of any desire to have power over others. Quite the contrary, in fact (unless I’m deluding myself). I’ve always believed in sharing power and responsibility as much as possible, but you can’t do that if you have an egomaniac boss or a rigidly hierarchical organisational structure. Yes, there are differences between staff and service users (staff get paid being the main one), but I try to minimise these as far as I can.
Cheese Grating
It was also gratifying to work in a London borough that not only funded my new organisation’s work, but whose commissioners seemed genuinely supportive. Within two weeks of me starting my new job, however, it was grating to be informed that the local authority would be able to fund us for only 40% of what we had budgeted for on their advice of just three months earlier. My first significant and highly unpleasant task, therefore, was to have to ask staff to reduce their hours from full-time to two days a week or to make them redundant in order that the organisation could survive.
Over the next two years, we began to flourish and I was able to bring in external funding to supplement the local authority’s money so that we could provide a still much-reduced service to what we had originally planned. Even so, it seemed popular with members, staff were highly skilled and dedicated to their work and feedback from carers and professionals who referred people to us was without exception, I think, almost worryingly positive.
Cheese Ripening
By working together on daily household and business tasks, we had established a sense of community, friendships and social engagement from a safe and supportive workplace. A lifeline for people whose experience was often one of many years of loss of sense of self and worth and an absence of meaningful relationships and occupation. A second home, where they were welcomed back with warmth and kindness into the human family (cite Richard Bentall’s ‘Doctoring The Mind’) and encouraged to believe that they had real reasons to hope for - and expect - better lives.
We had people going out into the community to volunteer and set up our own catering service to employ some of our members in very part-time casual work, based on their existing skills and interests. For all but one, this was the first paid work they had done in years. We weren’t able to find anyone permanent full-time employment during a time of global recession, but still I felt proud of what we’d achieved in difficult circumstances and with fairly limited resources.
Cheese-Induced Nightmare
So when I attended our annual review in 2009 with our main funder and described what we did and the impact it had on people’s lives I was gobsmacked to be told ‘We don’t care what you do or how you do it. We just want people off benefits and into work.’ I felt physically sick and faint.
While I understand (and, in principle, support) government targets to help people with disabilities to return to work, I’ve always been sceptical about the management-theory driven obsession with outcomes and, worse, the introduction of outcome-based contracting - where service providers get paid only if they meet agreed targets. What happens, is that the largest national providers are able to tender for local contracts with the lowest unit cost, inevitably, in my opinion, sacrificing quality (process) in the name of quantity (outcomes). Except that they fail to deliver.
Processed Cheese
To me, what we do and how we do it - the process - is of fundamental importance. There are plenty of organisations who work in completely different ways and who consistently fail to get people with diagnoses of schizophrenia (who form 60% of our membership) off benefits and into work and who receive considerably larger sums of money for doing so, making their CEO’s rich (and famous) in the process. Pushing people who lack confidence and don’t feel ready to work into inappropriate and unsupported employment simply doesn’t work for most and carries the very real risk of being detrimental to their mental health.
In order to massage their figures, these organisations ‘cherry-pick’ or ‘cream’ the most able and likely to find employment while ‘parking’ those with the most complex needs and severe disabilities, the very people small, local organisations like mine tend to work with. This is not to say that these people are not able. My experience tells me that indeed they are, but that they require much longer to build up sufficient confidence and trust and need much more support to do so. Time and support costs money, but so does a lifetime of unemployment and welfare dependence, not to mention the personal and social costs of inactive and isolated lives.
Cheesed Off
Well, that was a rather long-winded way of saying that in 2009 I began to feel that I was being fucked about at work. What I believed to be the right way of working and what I was being told to do by my paymasters conflicted and didn’t make any sense to me. A year later, while I had time on my hands due to my own physical and mental illness I ‘discovered’ that evaluations of the way I was being told to work clearly stated that this approach doesn’t work, either. I felt angry for not trusting my own judgment (based on experience and advice from mentors) and felt like I’d been bullied into submission, yet again.
Join me for another cheese and whine morning next time.
Twenty Ten (Part One): Hard Cheese
Abstract: Thankfully, there is no Part Two.
Tags: snowcock, nanowrimo, manflu, cheese, depression
Note: probably none of the links work now.
I began 2010 by wishing everyone (except fascists) a Happy New Year and a promise to blog my reflections on the naughty decade in due course.
Well, that will have to wait for another time, but here - thanks to my identi.ca memory aid - are my reflections on 2010.
After recovering from hiccups, speaking in tongues, a hangover the size of every Xmas and New Year and forced communication with O2’s customer service drones, I went back to work and set about the urgent task of building a snowwoman in the front garden.
This was my equal opportunities response the the much celebrated #SnowCock (replete with massive snowballs) of Glossop erected by Tim Dobson and friends.
Heaven snows he’s miserable now
Snowwoman somehow ended up transgendering into #SnowMorrissey until he inevitably lost his head, prompting a lyrical tribute from the similarly all-white and undead Andy C.
Just as life imitates art, ‘real’ life inevitably imitates life online. Perceptively and spookily - leaving aside the evidence of my maniacal online rantings - Andy C was concerned for my mental health.
If I’m honest, my most recent mental breakdown occurred somewhat earlier. Without wishing to go into too much detail and bore anyone with my personal troubles, I had been speaking with a psychotherapist since September 2009. After a few sessions, she expressed her concern that I might be ‘bipolar II’ and asked me to see my GP in order to get a referral to a psychiatrist for an assessment. I felt pretty shocked to hear this as I’d never considered that I might have had any hypomanic episodes (let alone needed to see a shrink) even though that might have explained some of my problems.
In tears, I told my GP what my psychotherapist had said, and thus I began my own pharmaceutical research into the effectiveness of anti-depressant medications to give me some respite (my GP’s word) from my heightened and unstable emotional state. My GP also referred me for a psychiatric assessment.
Mightily relieved finally to have spoken to someone about my difficulties and for allowing myself to ask for help, I felt as high as Jesus on the mountain for forty days and nights. Looking back now, it’s perhaps significant that my identi.ca output during this time was the highest it’s ever been (according to Michele’s Denticator - unfortunately it only shows the last 12 months, so you will have to take my word on that). Interestingly, my output last month, since I’ve been feeling better and like my ’normal’ self was just as high if not higher:
I also increased my long-form blogging output, with a serious intent to try to write more regularly and have some fun in doing so. Perhaps significantly, my first post during this high period was about mental health. I wrote eight proper blog posts in those forty days and nights including:
A rant on authority and the War of Terror
A tribute to Manchester United and my Mum and Dad
A reminiscence piece I originally wrote in 1989 about my time stuck in a blizzard on Longs Peak, Colorado
Another reminiscence piece, this time about a childhood incident
And a frankly bizarre post about a blue tit
It had taken me nine months to write my previous eight proper blog posts and almost five months to write the next eight. I wrote only one in the two months reviewed in this post while I was feeling so physically and mentally ill. Between May and December 2010 I wrote another fourteen.
I crashed down to earth only three days and six thousand unpublished words after my spur-of-the-moment decision to write a fifty-thousand word NaNoWriMo ’novel’ in thirty days. Like all the other novels I’ve started, this one remains unfinished, although I did get past page four on this occasion. All of this was while I was working full-time. Mild insomnia helped.
Man flu
Just like in 1994, 1999 and 2004, I felt myself slowly burn out as Xmas approached and by the time #SnowMorrissey had melted I was feeling too depressed to work or do anything else other than go to the doctor’s surgery. My GP doubled my anti-depressant dose and I later self-diagnosed the new but familiar sharp stabbing pain in my lower right side under my ribs as pleurisy for which I prescribed myself Lemsip Max. The previous year I’d had a similar but worse pain with frightening shortness of breath, which only cleared up after a month or so using an inhaler.
Less perceptively and spookily - and admittedly without the benefit of a stethoscope, cheeseometer or any medical training - Andy C was less concerned about my physical health. Less is more.
Six days later, after a brief investigation with her stethoscope, my GP confirmed my pleuritic self-diagnosis, signed me off work and prescribed my some antibiotics for a chest infection, too. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a cheeseometer either. I started to feel a bit better, but a cold winter’s night a week or so on and the pain returned. Perhaps understandably, I was generally feeling more and more miserable, too.
At least everything was running smoothly at work during my two weeks absence.
‘It’s just a slice of cheese’
I went back to work on 1 February feeling much better after United had made City wait another year at least for their first trophy since 1976 and after setting in motion Arsenal’s annual implosion.
Seventeen days and an x-ray later, however, I was in Accident and Emergency with a suspected collapsed right lung. After a blood test to make sure I wasn’t suffering from a heart problems I went home the same evening. The following day I developed a strong desire to punch Nicholas Winterton in the face. Repeatedly. And regularly. Say every ten minutes. Coincidence?
Pull yourself together
By now, I’d lost touch with Reality, defending homeopathy. I’d lost hope, despairing at James Robertson’s inevitably futile struggles to print and use his own postage using only Free and open source software. I’d lost my humanity, calling Basil Brush impersonator Richard Cutts a demented glove puppet for agreeing with me about Nicholas Winterton.
Three weeks before my x-ray, I’d phoned the local mental health trust to find out what had happened to the referral letter my GP had sent them back in September 2009, four months earlier. They helpfully told me that I wasn’t a priority for treatment because I was working and, therefore, apparently OK. I asked them what did I have to do in order to become a priority? Try to kill myself? They offered me an appointment the same afternoon.
Naively, I assumed that this would be an appointment with a psychiatrist. After waiting for an hour behind the locked doors and shatter-proof glass partitions of the Community Mental Health Team building that kept the professional healers and helpers apart from me and rest of the presumably perceived as dangerous local community it serves, it turned out to be an appointment with a nurse who scribbled a few notes on a scrap of paper. He then produced a copy of a letter dated the same day that he claimed had been posted to me the day before inviting me to a meeting with a psychiatrist in two weeks.
Three days before my x-ray, I met the psychiatrist. I made an extra effort to wash my hair, shave and put on clean clothes to make myself look less like Jim Ignatowski.
He sat in front of me reading my notes as if for the first time. After a couple of uncomfortably silent minutes he said ‘You’re not Stephen Fry bipolar.’
I suppose I should have been relieved about that, but my immediate reaction was confusion - how could he possibly know? All he had asked me was ‘Would you like a coffee?’ He didn’t even ask if I wanted decaf, sugar or milk and yet he was magically able to undiagnose me without conducting any blood tests, x-rays, scans or other measurements of the balance of chemicals sloshing around in my brain, which is the current unproven theory of choice among the medically inclined.
We had a bit of a chat. I asked for psychotherapy on the NHS as I could no longer afford to pay privately. He recommended that I keep taking the medication even though I complained to him that I felt worse than ever after four months on them. I was finding sleep difficult, yet felt tired all the time, couldn’t concentrate properly, had a dry mouth and sometimes felt my mood change from OK, to tearful, to agitated, to angry and even to suicidal in the space of a few hours.
I told him I’d washed and dressed specially for him. He laughed and said that was good, because otherwise he’d have had to section me under the Mental Health Act (have me forcibly detained in the mental health unit of the hospital). He rounded off our meeting by suggesting that I should pull myself together and get a life (not his exact words, but my honest interpretation and not far off). As I bid him goodbye and was closing the door to leave he asked me if I had any plans to kill myself.
I decided to stop taking my medication. Within ten days I successfully predicted England’s abysmal failure in the South African World Cup.
Look out for more cheesy Twenty Ten goodness next week as I march on into March and explain the cheesy references….
Waterboarding on the NHS
Abstract: Gagging for it. Tags: waterboarding, NHS, bronchoscopy, torture, worklessness, Nazi, psychotherapy, banana, splat
On Another Planet this week: controversial new government plans to tackle ever increasing worklessness using waterboarding.
Techniques refined and perfected by secret military personnel known only by their codename ‘Our Boys’ are being piloted by the NHS in an effort to ’encourage and empower’ people claiming statutory sick pay to return to work.
One persistent malingerer, who asked not to be identified, claimed that he was subjected to an horrific ordeal at the hands of his torturers and says he was tricked into believing he was just playing a game of ‘doctors and nurses’.
‘I always liked playing doctors and nurses when I was a kid,’ said Roger (not his real name).
Over to Roger to tell the rest of his story.
Nazi
I received a phone call from my local hospital telling me I had an appointment with the chest consultant I’d seen before. I thought it was a bit odd, because I’d seen the surgeon who operated on me only the previous day, but I went in anyway. I felt I could trust these people after they did such a great job of fixing my lung. Anyway, when I got there, they made me wait for an hour as usual, then a pretty young student doctor asked if I minded if she sat in on my appointment? How could I say no? I could barely speak with my tongue hanging out like that. So I just nodded and wiped the dribble from the side of my mouth hoping she hadn’t noticed. When I got to see the consultant himself I thought it was a bit odd that he was wearing full Nazi regalia, but he seemed like a nice guy and to know his stuff.
‘Don’t rush back to work", he said.
‘Now, about this bronchoscopy. Don’t worry, I’m sure everything will be OK. I’m 90% sure everything’s fine. People say it tickles a little bit, but you’ll have a sedative and some local anaesthetic that they put up your nose and on the back of your throat. That will make you cough, but it’s really nothing to worry about.’
‘Fine, I’ll do it,’ I told him.
So this week I went in for my ‘bronchoscopy’. After waiting the requisite hour, I was hurried into the day surgery operating theatre by a pretty young nurse and ignored by the doctor. Another nurse made small talk with me to reassure me. I clambered on to the operating table so that I was sat upright with my legs outstretched. The second nurse put a bib on me to deal with my dribbling while the doctor chatted with his friend on his mobile.
‘Hi, I’m Dr Heydrich,’ he said to me finally.
Although I had been feeling relaxed, at this point I suddenly felt a twinge of anxiety.
‘I’m going to put some anaesthetic gel up your nose,’ he said, as he squirted anaesthetic gel up my nose.
The second nurse then stuffed a tube up my left nostril, saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only oxygen.’
Banana splat
I looked at her and she had donned what looked like a welder’s visor. ‘You look like you’re about to do some welding,’ I said.
‘It’s just to protect myself from any splatter,’ she replied.
Another twinge.
‘OK, open your mouth, please,’ barked Heydrich. ‘I’m going to spray some anaesthetic on the back of your throat. It tastes very strongly of bananas,’ he added, as he sprayed what tasted like banana flavoured liqueur on to the back of my throat, making me cough. ‘Just a little bit more,’ he said.
‘UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I splattered.
‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated.
‘It’s OK,’ said the second nurse, holding my head down with her hand. ‘It makes you feel like there’s a ball in your throat and you can’t swallow.’
‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated, desperately.
Heydrich then took what I had thought was a stethoscope and zoomed towards me with the bright flashing end of it and shoved it up my right nostril.
AARRRGGHHH!!!" I said.
‘Let’s try the other one," said Heydrich.
They swapped the oxygen for the stethoscope, which then dropped out of my traumatised right nostril.
‘AARRRGGHHH!!! AARRRGGHHH!!!’ I repeated.
That hurt even more than the right one did. The second nurse (I don’t know what the first nurse was doing, but she was there afterwards) then pushed something into my mouth, saying, ‘Open your mouth and hold it with your teeth.’
Heydrich zoomed back into view.
‘We’ll try it through the mouth’, he said, as he pushed the thick black fibre-optic tube down my throat.
‘UURRRGGHHH!!! UURRRGGHHH!!!’
I tried to cough and splutter, but my throat was numb and I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was drowning.
‘UURRRGGHHH!!! AARRRGGHHH!!!’
I panicked and pulled the tube out, gasping for breath.
‘I can’t do it!’ I cried, literally, tears rolling down my cheeks.
‘I can’t do it. I’ll go back to work. I promise!’
Over. Roger and out.
Another Planet understands that if this pilot is successful, then the procedure will be rolled out to the rest of the UK in the coming months.
As Nick Clegg-Hess, Deputy Prime Minister, said:
‘What we need is strong, stable government. That means we must weaken and destabilise people who are not working for whatever reason and by any means necessary to get them to conform and work to pay our taxes. This is about control and maintenance of the status quo. Anyone who thinks otherwise is sadly deluded and will be dealt with accordingly. Waterboarding is an effective and reliable means of manipulating even the craziest of people to do what we want them to do. It’s in the national interest to get people off benefits and into work and we will do whatever it takes to make that happen, even if it means torturing people after they have already confessed."
On a more serious note, I’m open to suggestions for other medical procedures you’d like me to blog about. Let me know your ideas in the comments!
Confessions of a thoracotomy patient
Abstract: Lung-form blogging at its cheesiest.
Tags: thoracotomy, empyema, decortication, cheese, collapsed lung, chest infection, pleurisy, NHS,
Last week I met a beautiful young Hispanic woman and we spent the night together. She cared for me deeply and carefully, and I gazed upon her lovingly as the morphine (d)ripped through my veins. She checked me out and made sure that everything seemed to be in working order.
‘Hi, I’m Sofia,’ she said.
‘I’m going to be looking after you tonight.’
Thanks to the morphine, I carried on smiling and Sofia carried on with her job of nursing me through my first night after my thoracotomy on the high dependency unit of the five star NHS hospital I was staying in.
I had quite a good time despite drinking nothing but water the entire evening. We shared a few bottles together - Sofia would hand me an empty one, pull the covers around me and I would half-fill it and hand it back to her so she could measure and record, discard and disinfect. She checked my tubes and drains to make sure they weren’t getting clogged up with ‘cheese’ or any other unwanted dairy products. She made sure that my drains were working properly and that I was getting enough suction (stop it!). In the morning, she washed my back. My only regret is that half-way through the night somebody much more attractive ill than me was trolleyed through and Sofia spent more time with him than she did with me.
A good swing
So, Sofia had taken over from Gilbert, a beautiful young Chinese-looking man who I woke up with after my general anaesthetic. Gilbert was every bit as diligent and caring as Sofia and I don’t think this is just the drugs talking. I was amazed by the level of care I received throughout my stay, with one or two relatively minor exceptions, which I’ll come to later. And it’s not just because I was probably quite a good patient - I was calm, polite, not in any great pain or discomfort, doing well - eating, drinking, breathing, coughing and I had a ‘good swing’. Most of the other patients around me appeared to be quite a lot older than me and if not older then certainly in more pain or experiencing more problems after their operations. They were cared for with equal if not more time and attention as far as I could see and hear.
Who else do I need to thank for treating me so well? On admission to the hospital at 7 am on Friday morning I was met by nurse Martin, who seemed more nervous than me, but who handed me over to the highly organised Lindsay. Lyndsay wasted no time in getting me half-naked on to the bed so that she could attach clips and cables to my chest and stomach to run an ECG. Then she made me strip completely and wear a flowery dress. To complete my humiliation, she had me walk down to the diagnostic testing department in full public view where I had an x-ray. When I got back she wanted me to wear some thigh-high stockings, too. How could I resist her helping hands to put them on for me? Thank you Lyndsay!
Thanks also to Rick, the porter, for your sense of humour in wheeling me up and down and up and down again to the operating theatre where I’m sure everyone had a good laugh at me in drag. No doubt the pictures are all over the internet by now. And thanks to Dorcas, the clinical nurse specialist who spoke to me on the phone before I went in to tell me how bad it was going to be and who greeted me in the hospital before the operation with her hands - literally a nice touch, and one repeated by Lyndsay, Rick, Gilbert and Sofia later. A quick, simple touch to the hand, the shoulder, arm or elbow is extremely reassuring I find. Thanks for your humanity.
The cheese factor
Pre-operation, I also spoke to several doctors/surgeons/registrars or whatever they call themselves. They may even have had first names, but somehow if they did those names haven’t stuck. All I can really remember is being told that the operation would take 90-120 minutes rather than the 30-45 minutes I was expecting. This was due to the fact that they would be doing a conventional ’large’ incision of about 10 cm rather than the keyhole 2 cm cuts I’d been told I was going to have. The change of modus operandi was because of the ‘cheese’ factor - they needed to scrape the rind off the lung, not simply drain fluid. I signed the consent form. By this time they had me where they wanted me and I had resigned myself to my fate. What else could I do but submit? Yes, there’s a risk with everything, but carrying on with a lung full of cheese didn’t seem like a good bet.
Finally, Rick got me into theatre again after an aborted first attempt because my blood results weren’t back in time. This also meant a delay of an hour and a half, which didn’t affect me too much. I was kind of in a semi-meditational state I reckon. Either that or just frozen with fear. Now it was the turn of the anaesthetists to do things to me. Thanks to Belton (not Ben Elton) for painlessly finding my veins first time and inserting the cannulas that would feed the juice to knock me out and sustain me with fluids. All I can remember is a bit of aimless chit-chat, breathing deeply into the gas mask that was placed over my face and….
Chris the Crafty Cockney
Less than two hours later I woke up on the high dependency unit with Gilbert looking after me. At some point I remember my surgeon coming round to tell me, quite madly in his Chris the Crafty Cockney way:
‘You’re fixed!’
‘Thank you!’ I said.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
After Gilbert and Sofia, I was handed over to Tara, who was a bundle of fun in our short time together. Tara couldn’t wait to get rid of me, though, and pushed the wheelchair herself to get me on to the main ward so that she could go and have lunch or something. I had been looking forward to moving wards actually. The high dependency unit was a bit noisy and a bit dull and now I would have access to my belongings that I brought with me - mp3/video player, internet, email, phone, etc. But when I was shown to my room (it’s on old private hospital bought by the NHS) I felt strangely disheartened and lonely. On the high dependency unit, Gilbert, Sofia and Tara were always within eyesight or earshot, but on the ward my new nurse Nas and everyone else was gone within seconds. I was still attached to two drains and my morphine drip, so I couldn’t go anywhere. I felt as helpless as a baby.
At least I was on the ward in time for the Manchester derby, the most important game since the last one. And my mum and step-dad John were visiting at 2pm. Lunch was forgettable - one of my few complaints is that the food was largely very poor quality. As I discovered on my discharge from the hospital, there is a very good coffee bar and staff/visitors’ restaurant in the hospital, which I believe is managed by the same company that provides the patients’ meals, yet the comparison is dreadful. I didn’t have much of an appetite due to the morphine, but it doesn’t help when you are served up slop that is worse than school meals of thirty-odd years ago.
Back to the footy. My mum proudly explained that my brother would be texting her with news of any goals.
‘That’s great, Mum. But I’m getting text updates from the BBC every few minutes on my internet tablet.’
BBC text updates on one of the most uneventful ninety minutes in the history of football aren’t much fun, but sustained conversation more than my brother’s updates.
BLEEP!
Crikey, a text from my brother to my mother.
‘15 seconds left. Scholes header. Game over.’
My mum read the text out loud.
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
Oh, christ.
‘It means,’ explained ever-patient John, who is not a football fan:
‘United have won the game with a last minute winner yet again.’
‘Oh.’
‘What do you think it means?’
This remote victory barely raised a smile on my dry lips and hardly registered an increased pulse according to Nas when she took my blood pressure. It is surely my least celebrated United goal ever, although I did manage a laugh and a cheer the next morning watching the highlight on Match of the Day.
Sunday I had three separate visitors morning, afternoon and evening and I suspect I was fairly grumpy/tired during at least one of those, so apologies certainly to my dad. I have to say, though, that visits are extremely tiring and quite emotional. It’s no wonder hospitals advise no more than two visitors at a time. And when you’re in that state of post-op pain or discomfort, lack of mobility, tiredness, feeling sick etc., you’re really not much company. It’s great to see people, of course, but as a visitor you can’t expect too much from your relative or friend. And thanks, dad, for leaving me with the advice to get a hair cut and a shave so that I don’t look so much like Frank Gallagher!
A quick thanks also at this point to some more lovely nurses - Sarah, Yvonne, Nadia, Esther - sorry if I missed anyone.
Minor complaints
I mentioned earlier a couple of minor exceptions to the high level of care I received while in hospital.
One would be that the cannula on my wrist became loose, swollen red and painful. I asked one of the nurses about it and she said it was ok and bandaged it up (after dropping the bandage on the floor!) to hold it in place. Later another nurse came to use the cannula to inject my antibiotics. Now this can usually feel a little uncomfortable, but nothing more than that. This time I was screaming in agony. I pointed out the problem again and she said that it was ‘unacceptable’, removed the cannula, patched me up and fixed the cannula in my hand so that it could be used for both the morphine drip and the antibiotics, painlessly.
My second minor complaint would be that the same nurse who dropped the bandage came in gloved-up to remove my second drain, then went out again touching the door handle to call for assistance (two nurses are required - one to pull the drain out, one to tie the stitch, the painful bit). I asked her to change her gloves, which she did so willingly and acknowledging that she should do so. The point is that she should be taking the initiative not waiting for patients to prompt her. It’s fairly basic stuff.
My only other quibble is that I was discharged on Tuesday morning (four days after my op), barely able to walk more than a few yards without getting out of breath so basically forced to book a taxi home. They gave me some paracetamol, ibuprofen and dihydrocodeine for the pain, but for three out of the five days I’ve been home so far that hasn’t been enough to control the pain. It’s really been quite distressing for me and for my family to see me in so much pain and to be able to do nothing to help. I’m seeing my GP on Monday so maybe I’ll get some extra help with that.
The drugs didn’t work
I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for me to recover and go back to working full-time. As far as I know, I’m expected to make a full recovery, although I was a more than a little perturbed to read that post-op pain from a thoracotomy can take months or even years to go away.
I’m still not sure how this all happened. In January I had a chest infection and pleuritic pain similar to that which I’d had in March 2009 when I had a really acute episode of shortness of breath, fever and a consolidation on the same lung. That cleared up quickly with antibiotics and an inhaler. This time around, the drugs didn’t work, so my body responded by sealing off the infection in my lung by surrounding the lung with fluid.
Unfortunately I tried to work through this in February, which left me feeling too exhausted to go get an x-ray right away. Once I got the x-ray I was admitted to Accident and Emergency immediately where they did some tests to rule out heart problems, I think, before sending me home. Then I had to wait five weeks before seeing a chest specialist and another week or two before getting the results of fluid samples and a CT scan.
Hard cheese
As luck would have it, all of these tests were negative (ruling out the likes of cancer and smoking as possible causes, as far as I know). But the build up of fluid had continued and I had progressively felt more and more physically and mentally tired. My surgeon was certain that I had what is known as empyema (the hard ‘cheese’ as he called it and that I talked about earlier) and this required decortication (scraping the rind off the lung) via a thoracotomy (an incision along the underside of the shoulder blade).
As it turned out, I was told that the scraping bit wasn’t required, which is great news as that would likely have damaged the tissues of the lung. I’ll be seeing my surgeon again in a week or two I think and the chest specialist next month. I’ve been told it’s still possible that I could have tuberculosis, although there is no evidence of that yet (it takes a while to show up apparently). Meanwhile I’m taking antibiotics for pneumonia - if I don’t breathe deeply and cough well enough I’m at risk of getting a chest infection. And, despite the lovely nurses, I don’t want to go there again!