BREAKING NEWS - UPDATE!

 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.