… recovering from a kind-of diabetic coma.
It’s amazing the things you learn. There I was, sitting in my hospital chair late this morning, and I must have dropped off … "to sleep, not off the chair" – ed … on one of my usual deep sleeps and the next thing that I knew was that three nurses had me on the bed tearing off my clothes.
“My lucky day” you might think, but they were busy trying to stuff jam sandwiches and orange juice down my throat and put a hospital gown onto me.
These sleeps that I’ve been having, or, at least, that one, have been diabetic comas (and they used that phrase to describe them, not me) caused by low blood sugar levels.
That’s no surprise because I never use sugar apart from in the odd bit of baking here and there. The sugar in the sugar container is replaced every year if it’s lucky, and the sugar lumps, I’m on my second box since I moved here in 2017
As for my brown sugar for cooking, I’ve just started the third lot of that.
Anyway, lest night I actually managed to go to bed at some kind of reasonable time and, strangely for a night before travelling, I actually fell asleep, at least for part of it.
When the alarm went off I was asleep, that’s for sure. I fell out of bed and did half of what was necessary, when I was interrupted by a series of text messages.
Basically, the Olympic Flame is doing a lap around the town today and they’d begun to close off the streets. The car that is to take me to Avranches is on its way or else it’ll either be stuck here or else it won’t be here at all.
So taken by surprise by this, I’ve left my apartment in quite a mess.
It was my favourite young driver – and two other passengers – who were in the car and we had a pleasant drive down to Avranches. There’s another part of the hospital opposite the main building. I didn’t know that but my driver did which was just as well because that’s where I’m going.
The driver leapt out of the car and fetched a wheelchair for me. That’s where we are now, people. Can you believe it? Even a taxi driver is worried.
A nurse went through all of the preparatory questioning and so on, and then I had to wait around for the specialist.
It only needed one look, and he made up his mind. “I’ll telephone them to see if there’s a bed spare”.
And there was too, but I had to wait around for quite a while before I could be picked up and taken across the road.
For some reason, and I dared not ask, the windows were wide open and it was blowing a gale through here. So we closed the window and we went through the induction process.
Then I settled into the comfy chair to type out the dictaphone notes, and that was when my troubles began – as if wrestling on a bed with three nurses would ordinarily be described as a trouble, but that shows just about where we are too.
Don’t ask me what happened after that because I don’t know. Something must have gone on somewhere somehow because the next thing that I remember was that is showed 09:50 on an analogue clock on the wall.
At first I had no idea what time or even what day it was but in the end I worked out that it was actually 21:50 the same day. What happened to the rest of the day?
All I’d had to eat all day was some cauliflorets and bread. I was starving but that’s too bad. And were I to tell you my current weight instead of my target weight of 75 kilos you’ll probably think that it’s a good thing.
But I was exhausted. In a wretched state and all I wanted to do was to curl up under the blanket and go to sleep. I dashed off a few words on the phone because I couldn’t reach the computer, and that was that.
The induction process reminds me of the induction process at one hospital in Belgium
"You are allowed one person of your choice to sleep in your room with you during your stay" said the nurse.
"Right ho!" I replied. "You don’t happen to know Kate Bush’s phone number, do you?"
