… I am right now!
Anyone say “The Emergency Department of the hospital at Avranches”?
If you did, then I’m afraid that you are wrong. That was earlier in the afternoon.
Right now I’m in a bed in a ward in the hospital, thinking to myself “it’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
Last night there wasn’t the slightest hint of this. I was in bed quite early again, not long after 23:00 in fact and looking forward to a good night’s sleep.
And good it was too, all the way through to … errrr … 05:30 when I had another dramatic awakening. This morning though I couldn’t go back to sleep and so when the alarm went off at 07:00 not only was I sitting at my desk working, I had, in reverse order, had my medication, had a shave, washed my clothes, washed myself and, the pièce de résistance, dictated all my radio notes from earlier in the week.
Then I dictated most of the dictaphone notes, and you won’t believe how many there are. But you’ll have to wait a while to see them unfortunately.
The nurse came today and we had a really good chat for once – he was in a much better humour than I expected him to be.
After he left I made breakfast and read some more of MY BOOK but if you want to share in it, you’ll have to wait until I’m back home.
After breakfast I finished the dictaphone notes and then, in a mad fit of energy, I attacked the radio notes for the eleventh track for programme 260306 (I think).
Once that was completed and assembled I gave some serious thought to starting the next but was overwhelmed by an attack of nausea and a stabbing pain in my stomach, as if I’d swallowed a brick. It slowly became worse and worse and by 11:00 I was back in bed.
When it was time to prepare for dialysis I struggled (and it was a struggle) to my feet. My cleaner took one look at me and telephoned the dialysis centre to tell them how bad I was. She and the taxi driver had to help me to the car.
At the dialysis centre they had a room waiting for me and a doctor (not Emilie the Cute Consultant, unfortunately) standing by and he gave me a thorough going-over and they took a blood sample I fell on the bed and crashed out The drive down there had been awful
When I awoke, a nurse was waiting for me. "I’m afraid to say that when you have finished here, you are going over the road to the hospital. It’s your pancreas".
Again? It’s already given out once, before I left the UK and I remember the agony that I was in at times. Since then, I’ve been scrupulously avoiding all kinds of animal fats. So what’s gone wrong now? What’s going to be the next proscribed food product?
Of course, it would happen to be a day where not only could I go home early, my favourite taxi driver had been rostered to take me home.
They took me on a stretcher in an ambulance across the road to the hospital and here I am, sharing a room with someone else, something that I don’t do very well. My faithful cleaner was waiting for me with another neighbour who had brought her down. And she had all of my things too. The dialysis centre had ‘phoned her.
The worse news is that I’m not allowed food until tomorrow morning. That means that I will have been twenty-four hours without food. I’m not allowed to drink very much either.
There was time to watch one of the football matches that I had wanted to see. Caernarfon were really slow to start and were 1-0 down after five minutes, and could easily have been down 4-0 in the first twenty minutes.
However, once they warmed up, they were unstoppable and the final score of 5-2 doesn’t reflect the overwhelming superiority that Caernarfon had.
So right now, I’m off to sleep, it I can, ready to see what these examinations show tomorrow.
But seeing as I have been talking about the nurses … "well, one of us has" – ed … the one waiting by my bedside earlier said "you have acute pancreas"
"Thank you" I replied. "I’m so glad that you like it"
