… was all it took for them at the hospital to send me off for a blood transfusion. it was that obvious. They didn’t even wait for a sample of my blood.
No wonder that I’d been feeling like The Wreck Of The Hesperus for the last week or two.
They asked me a few pointed questions about some symptoms and when I answered in the affirmative that was all it took and I was off dragged to the Day Centre.
It was cold in my room last night and what with that and the general change in situation (because I’m having some real difficulty sleeping right now, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall) I hardly had any sleep at all last night and it was most uncomfortable. There was nothing whatsoever on the dictaphone, and that should give you a clue.
Breakfast was included in the price of my room so when the alarm went off I was downstairs quite quickly. Breakfast was actually quite nice although there wasn’t anything special to eat. And then back up here for a nice shower.
At 09:00 I was out of the door and across the road into the bus station and I didn’t have to wait long for a bus. It was quite crowded but I managed to find a seat.
Registering at the hospital was quite quick but then I had to wait an age to be seen because I’d arrived well in advance of my appointment. The doctor had quite a long chat to me and then went to fetch her professor who had an even longer chat with me.
They weren’t too happy that I hadn’t gone for my appointments at the New Year but I explained all of the issues that I was facing – how I couldn’t walk, how I can no longer go through Paris, how there were no buses running when I needed to leave etc etc.
It all resolved itself with them saying that they will arrange a few appointments for me in 3 months time and they would like me to attend.
We shall see.
It was a different Day Centre to the usual one. It was quite a hike as well so they stuck me in a wheelchair and sent for someone to push me. I had to wait about half an hour for someone to come and then we set off on our marathon hike.
At the Day Centre I had another long wait until a comfy chair liberated itself and then an even longer wait for the blood to arrive from the central repository. They found me some food and a few cups of coffee while I was waiting so it wasn’t all despair.
Everything took so long to organise that it was almost 18:30 when I finally left. Too late to go to the chemist to redeem my prescriptions and too late to go to pick up the spices from the Asian warehouse. Instead, I caught a bus back to town.
On the way back to the hotel I popped into the supermarket down the road and bought some bread and tomatoes. It’s going to be another long day tomorrow on the road and I’ll need some supplies.
And then I borrowed a knife from the restaurant and made some sandwiches here for the journey back home.
There’s a fritkot around the corner from here and you can’t come to Belgium and not have your supply of fritjes so I went down there later on and had my fritjes with some vegan loempjes that they had. One thing about being in Leuven is that with so many students here there’s a good range of vegetarian and vegan food.
So an early start tomorrow, probably without breakfast because they don’t start serving it until 07:00 and I’ll be leaving Brussels on the bus at 08:20 so I need to get a move on.
