I posted recently about my accident and what happened in the first week thereafter. A number of people were kind enough to compliment the piece and even to ask if there would be a follow up, since there would still be three weeks to go in hospital after I'd come round from the first operation. I thought about that and decided I would have a crack at it, but that it would have to be a different sort of piece - a bit more reflective perhaps - since much of what happened during those three weeks was dull and repetitive, which doesn't make for a great read. So what follows is a bit experimental. I hope that if nothing else it'll help get me back into writing!
BREAKING NEWS - UPDATE!
I open my eyes and look around. Familiar surroundings. As comforting as a dentist's waiting room can
be. But…I AM NOT IN THE DENTIST’S
WAITING ROOM!! Might have fooled me once
but not twice. There are the same
masked figures scurrying round though and three or four other beds containing
patients that I’m fairly sure haven’t been put there by the dentist’s
inadequacies. This is definitely the
recovery room so I must have had my second operation. Yes, look, a nurse is trundling her machine
up to take my blood pressure – a procedure with which I have grown all too
familiar in the last three weeks. She
says something about a sandwich. ‘Low
blood pressure?’ I enquire knowledgeably.
She nods. ‘Yes, but not as low as
last time’ which makes me wonder just how low it had been.
It's now a fortnight since my first operation
which was itself a week after the accident.
I try to take stock. Family and
friends of course have been brilliant, as has the NHS in taking care of me thus
far. But beyond that have I learnt
anything – about myself or about the system that has taken over my life? When I dispensed careers advice in a former
life – a former century even – I talked a lot about nursing and the information
and advice I passed on may well have been sound. But it was probably about the wrong things to
a large extent, or – to be kinder to myself – not enough about the right things. The reality of twelve hour shifts on a busy
ward full of demanding patients. The
older nurse with back problems who nonetheless struggled to help me in and out
of bed. The man in a nearby room who
constantly called ‘Help me, please help me!’ then when one or more nurses
responded to his cries yelled at them to get out. ‘Get out!
Get out!! Bang!!’ Was he miming shooting them? Probably.
Fortunately he was there for only a couple of nights but long enough for
me to find out that ward staff didn’t enter his room without security being present. And then there’s their unrelenting focus on
bowels which featured in very few – if any – of my careers guidance
interviews. The observation is not mine –
it was made to me by a senior nurse.
‘Yes,’ she remarked, ‘to be a good nurse you have to be fixated on what
goes in one end and what comes out the other.’
The truth of this was borne in on me one day when my daughter was
visiting and a lesser deity than the one who had carried out the first
operation swept into the room with a backing pantheon of would-be deities. They looked like a 60’s pop group – think
Billy J Kramer with the Dakotas but without the screaming. There must have been five or six people
clustered round the bed when the curtain was swept aside to reveal a nurse who
– oblivious to all else – announced her presence in a voice which stopped Billy J dead in his tracks. ‘Have you moved
your bowels today?’ she demanded. The truthful answer – yes, but with great difficulty and to
not much effect – seemed rather too much information for the assembled company
so I merely nodded weakly and assured her I had.
She was one of very many nurses and other ward
staff I met and got to know who were of Afro-Caribbean descent, largely, I
imagine, descendants of the Windrush generation. At a rough guess a good three quarters were
in this group whilst of the rest very few would have ticked the White British
box on those ubiquitous ethnic monitoring forms everyone sends out. The Royal London Hospital – and I suppose
many others – simply wouldn’t function without them and they looked after me
impeccably and for the most part cheerfully.
On the very few occasions they weren’t cheerful it was more than likely
a reaction to my feeling at a low ebb.
But how could I fail to be moved by the nurse who attempted to take my
blood pressure in the middle of the night without waking me up? She almost managed it but not quite. Or even more moved by the two or three who
told me they would remember me in their prayers? I have no doubt that they did.
I also learnt that hospital life consists of a
very few flashes of elation, long periods of tedium and occasional moments when
it would be easy to give in to despair.
The first of these followed the achievement of some landmark – an
operation successfully completed or the first time I was able to take a few
steps – white knuckles and all – clutching a Zimmer frame. One small step for a man; one giant leap
forward…. The body blow which was having
the second operation postponed happened twice, both times late in the afternoon
of the scheduled day. The pre –
operation routine started the evening before with nothing at all to eat or
drink after about 9 o’clock and on both occasions I expected to be taken to
theatre around lunchtime. But the Royal
London is a leading trauma hospital and patients coming in with life
threatening conditions will jump the queue.
It sounds perfectly reasonable sitting here typing it but it feels a bit
less so when you finally get the dreaded message about 4.30 or 5 o’clock, and
realise that it’ll be another three or four days before there’s another chance. As a result I stayed in hospital about a week
longer than planned, but on the second occasion I was impressed to find that
the senior surgeon made a point of coming to my room to apologise in person and
explain what had happened. It would have
been easy to delegate that to the ward staff.
But on both occasions no meal had been ordered so it was back to
sandwiches and chocolate bars.
I doubt if I learned as much from the periods
of tedium as I might have done. I was
though surprised to discover that you can actually look forward to a trip to X
ray as a means of breaking the day up, and also surprised that it’s not easy to
make very positive use of the rather large amount of time you have on your
hands. Or, indeed, on your back. Pain killers made sure I wasn’t in too much
pain from the injury or the surgery, but didn’t seem to do a lot to ease the
discomfort which comes from spending too long in bed – the back, the base of
the spine and the bum are the pressure points which protest most vigorously and
this of course makes it difficult to concentrate for any length of time on
reading or writing. Which doesn’t leave
a lot other than emailing, crosswords and old episodes of Porridge and Yes,
Minister – increasingly brilliant the older it gets – on iPlayer. Oh, and my son kindly bought a subscription
to BT Sport so I could compound my anguish by watching England’s Ashes
humiliation.
Talking of Porridge, there’s an episode
where the old hand Fletcher is schooling first timer Godber in the importance
of savouring ‘little victories’ – small ways of beating the prison system. Being in hospital for a few weeks is a bit
like that – but in my case savouring moments of humour which puncture some of
the unnerving intensity of being cocooned in an institution which largely runs
your life for you. I felt just like
Fletcher, in fact, although the staff who dealt with me were much more
benevolent than Mr McKay. There was the
catering lady who swept in early on the morning of a scheduled operation day to
announce that she knew I was nil by mouth but what would I like for lunch? Or there was the nurse who answered my call
for assistance in the small hours of one morning when my back and coccyx were
getting increasingly uncomfortable. He
did what he could to re-arrange pillows – I think I had five – and blankets to
make things a bit more tolerable. ‘Take
it easy!’ he breezed as he left the room and I smiled at the incongruity. For some time and because I was inactive I
needed a daily injection in the stomach to prevent blood clotting. The nurse who administered it would usually
precede the injection with a bright smile and a ‘slight scratch coming!’, so it
caused great hilarity when I said it for her one day although she was shaking
with laughter somewhat alarmingly as the needle went in. On another occasion though I did feel I ought
to adopt a fatherly tone (grandfatherly?) with a young student who flashed the
bright smile well enough as she had no doubt been trained to do but then
changed the accepted form of words to ‘just a small prick!’ As gently as I could I suggested this wasn’t a
good idea – I dread to think what Mr Get out! Get out!! Bang!! would have made
of it – whereupon she momentarily looked blank, then seriously embarrassed and laughed
nervously. I was delighted that she
turned up a day or two later saying she needed a witness statement from a
patient for her training course and hoped I would provide her with one. I decided not to mention the unfortunate
choice of words.
One thing that had increasingly intrigued me
was the question of how I was going to travel the couple of hundred miles to get
home. Unable to walk more than a few
steps and then only with a Zimmer frame I didn’t much fancy the Hammersmith and
City Line from Whitechapel, change at King’s Cross for the main line to Hull. I mentioned this to one or two people who
frowned and talked about how they would ‘repatriate’ me – a wonderful phrase
that I thought they must have picked up at a seminar led by Priti Patel. It turned out eventually that I was to be
‘repatriated’ by means of a fully equipped NHS emergency ambulance with a crew
of two, all provided free of charge by the NHS.
Not only that, but I was to be repatriated with a perching stool and a
commode that couldn’t be transported by the same ambulance and had to be
entrusted to a separate courier.
Come the much anticipated day of the journey
and I found out what it was like to feel elation, boredom, despair then elation
again all on the same day and all at a high degree of intensity. I hadn’t had to manage such powerful
conflicting emotions since the days of parenting small children. At first I was dressed and ready to be driven
home quite early in the morning – real clothes after four weeks in hospital
gowns! - then it was put back to eleven o’clock, then about two o’clock. By about four o’clock and with no information
as to what was going on – or wasn’t going on – I was convinced nothing was
going to happen that day and that I was going to be stuck in hospital
indefinitely with Covid numbers rising and staff shortages meaning that nobody
would be available to take me home any time soon. Murder was close to being done, but it
wouldn’t have looked good to have to ask my intended victim for help in getting
me out of bed first.
Then finally at about half past four and
without warning a man and a woman showed up wearing the uniform of the Kent
Ambulance Service. They’d come to take
me home, they said, although clearly didn’t know where Hull was and were a bit
taken aback to find how far they’d got to go, a journey of fully five
hours. When we stopped at Watford Gap
services the driver asked if I was in much pain and looked pleased when I said
it was getting worse. ‘Oh good’ he said, and catching my look of surprise added
‘it’s just that if you are in pain my boss has cleared me to drive on a blue
light.’ I’m sure he was pleased for themselves
as much as for me, knowing that after dropping me they would have to drive the
ambulance back to Maidstone in Kent, a journey of some 225 miles. And so after four weeks I arrived back in Hull
in a blaze of blue lights and with two tone horns blaring.
‘It’ll give the neighbours something to talk
about’ I said.
She smiled.
‘It always does’ she said.
