the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

My recent stay in hospital has had a profound effect on me, the Berkshire Belle and thus my life. It is something that I am only just beginning to recognise, and therefore I have not yet fully understood it and cannot, as yet, come to terms with.

I had not realised until a couple of weeks after I came out of hospital the full picture of how ill I had been. I had not inkling of the conversation that the Hastings Hottie had had with the cardiologist on the first Thursday of my stay in hospital, and how she had gone home that evening with a real expectation that the ‘phone call would come to say that I had gone.

As an ex-nurse she is in that difficult position of knowing too much and not enough at the same time, and recognised that, despite the platitudes, I was close to the end and that the medical team were running out of options. Fortunately, on the next day, Friday, they worked out where the problem was and scheduled me for theatre.

My memories of that first week are sketchy. I can remember lying on the floor and thinking how nice the carpet was, then I have a memory of a lady paramedic talking to me, but I was floating in and out of consciousness. I can recall being taken back into the ambulance and then being in a bed in a corridor, and then being taken for some test or other, of having lost my parking space in the corridor on return in A&E and having to be found another space there. I can remember ringing the BB and telling her that I was in Bay 16 and then of being taken up onto Amply Ward where a bed was available.

Most of what I remember of that first week is pleasant. The ward was just around the corner from where I had stayed for the bulk of my last stay eleven years ago and so I could see the helicopter come into land and, in the distance, some of the same countryside. There are some unpleasant memories; one nurse who had trouble finding a vein to take blood from being brutal with the tourniquet and leaving me with a bruise that has only just faded, and having to wear incontinence pants. I am not sure if I was sedated or not at that point, but it could explain why I was, as the Wonder of Wokingham puts it, not really with it a lot of the time.

This is me at 0700 on Saturday the 16th June, ten or so hours after coming back from surgery. I am not sure who took the photo, I don’t think that I did.

And this is me at 1045 the next day, Sunday 18th June. I am feeling pretty good and have made the effort to put a decent shirt on. At that point we hadn’t got my electric razor sorted and so I am unshaven. I am on the Critical Care ward with my own room and a nurse stationed outside where she can see me through the window by the door. There is a visible transformation.

In the Critical Care ward I may well have been sedated. Certainly I was confined to be from the time that I arrived there on Friday evening until around the middle of the following week when, having asked if I could have a shower instead of the daily blanket baths, I was assisted to the shower by a nurse who washed and dried me as I sat in a plastic chair.

I had no strength in my legs and, on the Thursday of that week two Physio ladies turned up to see me and to get me out of bed. I quickly came to loathe them as they got me doing things that I really did not enjoy. Walking with a Zimmer frame was just about bearable, but standing on one leg was not, and nor were any other of the exercise that they put me through. I christened them Bambi and Thumper after two characters in Diamonds are Forever who give James Bond a working over.

They came twice on the Thursday and then again on the Friday morning. Friday afternoon Bambi turned up with a male colleague and they took me out for a walk in the ward using a walking stick and, presumably liking what they saw, asked if I would try some stairs. Whilst walking on the level was an issue, the stairs were a breeze and I flew up two flights with no problem and came back down equally confident. My torturers were satisfied that I could walk and my days in critical care were numbered; the next day I was moved out.

Back on an ordinary ward I quickly weaned myself off the incontinence pants and began to walk up and down the ward’s corridors. I needed my walking stick, but the main aim was to be seen to be making an effort as I wanted to be sent home.

I was on a schedule of drugs, in tablet, injection and drip-feed forms, these being served up around the clock, and I was also still having my blood pressure and sugar levels checked at regular intervals. My room on the ward was one of the standard five bed type and I was, this time, in the bed next to the bathroom. One of the problems with being in this sort of situation is the risk of becoming institutionalised, and I tried to resist that, but things like mealtimes can assume a level of importance, that need for a routine is very pervasive, especially as I enjoyed the food.

My efforts to avoid sinking into the mire were in my walking, and that gave me an escape, even if only for a few moments. The Berkshire Belle persuaded my that she and I should go down to the Costa Coffee bar in the hospital’s reception area and we did that a couple of times during my last week and I also went down there after breakfast on my last two days.

I was released two weeks earlier than planned, primarily because I had shown that I could get about unaided, and had intended to go back to work a couple of weeks later, but my GP signed me off for longer on the basis that I needed the time to recover. He was right, although I was disappointed, but the reality is that I am struggling with my physical fitness. A combination of Sciatica and Plantar fasciitis makes walking difficult and I need to be able to walk around six miles in a four hour session when I go back to work.

So my first change is physical, in that I walk like an old man for the first time, age looks to have caught up with me. The other change is really mental in that I have been off work for two months now, the longest I have been off work in my adult life. I desperately need to get back into the saddle to sort my mind out, but am not fully confident that my body will take it, which is another mental issue.

Time will tell, and I hope that the next life log will tell of everything being fine.