This evening while I was trying to eat my evening meal someone from the cardiac unit turned up and said that she could take out the drain in my heart.
Not exactly the easiest thing to do while I has trying to eat my hummus rolls but nevertheless she did her best.
You’ve no idea how much it hurt but as they said in Macbeth, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly” and sure enough even with it done quickly, it hurt like hell.
So right now I’m free. There are some antibiotic perfusions too but they are on a portable patient stand, not tied to the foot of the bed like the sac of the drain in my heart.
Anyway, I’m sure that you are wondering how I celebrated my new-found freedom. The answer is that I went for a good ride on the porcelain horse.
You’ve no idea how much of a relief it was to go as well. This chair thing that I managed to negotiate has a considerable amount of drawbacks that only become apparent when you are half asleep and in some other parallel universe at 05:00.
That kind of thing is a recipe for disaster, as events were to prove. For the rest of the day I quietly abstained. I didn’t want another repeat.
It’s quite true to say that i was deep in the arms of Morpheus last night. I was tucked up in bed early, round about 21:00 and went straight off to sleep. When I awoke at 03:00 I still had on the headphones and was listening to the radio. I just about managed to summon up the energy to take off the headphones.
And then there was the 05:00 disaster but we won’t talk about that.
All of my meals were absolute disasters today. Breakfast was interrupted by the Professor in charge of the Training School telling me that the students would be on the ward this morning.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’m one of the first to offer myself to a bunch of students in order to be poked and prodded about. Consequently I agreed to be examined and at 10:05 a pair of students appeared at the door.
Third-year students they were, and for the next hour or so they poked me and prodded me, sometimes with the Professor looking in, and eventually the went away quite satisfied with their morning’s examination.
We had quite a laugh though at one point.
Student A “I need to look for your spleen”
Our Hero “I hope that you have good eyes. Last time I saw it, it was in a jar in a hospital in Central France”
While lunch was being served, the assistant dietician appeared. She’d seen my recent blood test results and made the point that there’s still far too much potassium in my blood. She wants me to give up all fruit and salad.
That’s only a temporary measure, she told me. The chief dietician will come to see me at some other point in the near future. Presumably with some even more draconian measures.
This afternoon the physiotherapist stuck his head into the room with an assistant. They ended up by giving me some exercises to do but it’s not easy when I can only move half a dozen paces from the bed if that.
There was the person from Cardiology to disrupt my evening meal at teatime but apart from that there’s not been a whiff of a doctor coming to see me. It seems that since my somewhat … errr … frank discussion with the Priest yesterday (which he has doubtless reported back to the authorities and which was part of my plan) the senior medical staff has gone to ground and are in shelter waiting for the whirlwind to pass by overhead.
Consequently I reckon that I need to be a bit more frank with the Priest next time I see him.
All through the day I’ve been having some lovely chats with Liz, Rachel and Rosemary. It’s nice to know that I have such wonderful family and friends.
As I have said before … “and on many occasions too” – ed … I don’t have many friends but those I do have are the best in the world.
