Tag Archives: blood transfusion

Friday 11th December 2015 – EEEUUURRRGGGHHH

I had to go to the hospital today. And so that meant a 07:00 start. And never did I feel less like it either after yet another uncomfortable night.

When the alarm went off I crawled downstairs and made a coffee. Some muesli and fruit juice later, I was properly fed and watered but still not on the same planet as anyone else, I reckon.

As I drove to Montlucon I slowly started to wake up and by the time I arrived at the hospital I was maybe feeling as much as half-human. “Half-man, half-aardvark” I thought to myself. “I’ve clearly been varking too ard”. But at least my luck was in somewhere. I was 20 minutes early and there was a parking place right outside the door of the hospital.

One of the more friendly nurses was on duty at the day-hospital and she even found me a mug of coffee to go a little further in rousing myself from lethargy. But she has three goes at trying to put a drain in me, without much success, and went off to call a colleague to have a go. I thought to myself “hang on a minute – these b******s are playing darts with me!”. They were all having a good moan about not being able to find a vein with any blood in it. “Hardly surprising” I retorted. “You’ve already taken most of it!”

So I was there at 08:40 – I had a drain put in at 09:40, and the blood finally arrived at … errr … 11:40, by which time we were three people in a day ward meant for two. They managed to conjure up something for lunch too – mushrooms in tomato sauce with rice and bread, with a pear for dessert. Hardly the most appetising meal that I’ve eaten – I’ll take butties next time.

My first blood pochette was empty by 13:05 – and it took until 14:00 for them to couple up the second. As a result, I wasn’t able to leave until 15:30 and that annoyed me a little – I should have been long gone from here by then. But feeling like nothing on earth, I went for a coffee in the cafe while, apparently, all the time they were frantically searching for me to tell me that I need to come back on Tuesday at 10:40 for another series of tests.

So having recomposed myself a little I went back home – to Pooh Corner that is. I had a little relax, ate some biscuits and watched something on the laptop. And then I came back to Liz and Terry’s for tea and my evening injection.

None of this did anything to cheer me up and, being totally whacked and thoroughly fed up, by 20:10 I was off to bed. And it wasn’t long before I went to sleep either.

And the result?

Here I am at 04:00 updating my blog. I’ve been awake since about 02:15 and I can’t go back to sleep. I’ll probably be like this now until mid-morning when I’ll crash out yet again and this will mess up my revision plans for today – having had them totally messed up already for today. I’m never going to finish this blasted course.

I just really wish that I could bring a little order into my life right now, but that’s not going to be possible, so it seems.

Thursday 10th December 2015 – IT WASN’T ANYTHING LIKE …

… as good last night as it had been for the previous two nights. It was another night of tossing and turning in bed for a couple of hours in the middle of the night and while I did manage to wander off on my travels, I don’t remember a thing about it.

The nurse came round early enough for my morning injection and also to take a blood sample. I have to go through this routine twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, as well as my twice-daily injections of anti-coagulant.

Later in in the morning, Terry had to sweep the chimney. It’s blocked up a little and the boiler here isn’t drawing to well. At least that’s his excuse. The real reason is that there will be a couple of Little People here over Christmas and Father Christmas will need to have a free passage into the house.

I think that I have it tough with having to stand on a step-stool and reach out of my attic windows with a very long brush to sweep the snow off my solar panels. To clean his chimney, Terry has to dismantle one of his attic windows, climb out onto the roof and then climb up onto the chimney stack. Then he can brush the chimney downwards from the top. He’s built a soot trap into the wall on the ground floor and all of the soot falls down into there where it can be shovelled out and vacuumed up.

After that, I cracked on alternating between having a doze and doing my revision. That kept me going until 18:30 when I had a most unwelcome phone call. It seems that my blood count is down again and I have to go into the day-hospital tomorrow for a blood transfusion.

An early start, a drive to Montlucon, an injection and then a blood transfusion. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow at all.

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I didn’t have a great many interruptions today. And even better, being free of tubes and pipes for once, I took advantage of the shower that is in my little washroom here and had one of the nicest showers that I’ve ever had. And don’t I fell better for it? It certainly cheered me up.

Last night’s sleep was nothing much to write home about, particularly after the good night that I had had previously. But nevertheless I was on my travels once more during the night. I was running a taxi business with a group of kids, all about 9 or 10 and one day we were clearing up the yard and gathered together an enormous amount of waste or scrap which was valued at £280. For this, I was offered a brand-new car and that seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime deal to me so I was keen to accept. But these kids must have misunderstood because they thought that I was swapping it all for a set of new tyres, which was nothing like the same deal. as a result they insisted on accompanying me to do the deal. But we ended up in the local swimming baths and the papers somehow or other found their way into the water and no sooner had I retrieved one of them then another paper would find its way into the water and I had to fish that out of the water too. And so on.

And so having sorted myself out, I had the first of my visits today. I have finally made the acquaintance of the doctor who is dealing with my case. And while she’s not yet completed her enquiries, it’s pointing more and more towards a lymphoma. But in other news, my haemoglobin count has gone right down again to 7.8 and that means that this afternoon I’ll be having another blood transfusion.

We then had the usual pantomime with the Accounts Department. I shan’t bore you with the details because I’ve talked about them before, and doubtless I’ll be talking about them again. But basically, they are moaning that I haven’t paid them anything for my treatment so far. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have an assurance from my former employers, and the idea is that whenever I go for any major treatment, I produce a card with an emergency phone number on it, the hospital or whatever phones it up and this opens a direct billing account. However, you might recall that the person on “reception” at the Emergency Admissions refused to call it up.

And so I had to request a form, which duly came, and I completed it and handed it to the hospital to fax off and to keep a copy so that they had all of the details to hand. But they refused to do that too, and so I had to post it off my snail mail.

And the result of all of this is that they now have to wait upon the pleasure of the Post office – and serve them right too.

While I was waiting for the blood I did the test that I needed to take for the end of my fourth week of my University course. I ended up with 90% which was disappointing as far as I was concerned because I fell down on the identification of the god Mithras and also on the pathological question concerning the kid’s skeleton that had been disinterred from under the floor of an army barracks.

I’m now four days behind on this course, despite at one stage of having been three days ahead. I need to get a wiggle on.

Later on, they came round with the blood.
“You’re having a lot of blood” said the nurse
“Well don’t worry” I replied. “If you run short, I’ll put on a black cape and prowl the streets of Montlucon at midnight”

They took so much time to organise themselves with this blood that by the time they had finished with the blood transfusion, it was after 22:00. I was too tired to try to watch a film and so I just crawled under the covers and went off to sleep.

Wednesday 25th November 2015 – I’VE BEEN DISCHARGED

Well, expelled, more like. Liz came by to pick me up at about 18:00 to take me home. She had to wait half an hour because the hospital hadn’t quite finished with me, but I soon put all of my things together, got dressed, and we were off.

Stopping off at the bank on the way back to start to build up a little war chest for the future, we were back at Liz and Terry’s for about 19:30. After a quick snack, because I wasn’t all that hungry, I wandered off to the bed that they had prepared for me, and that was that.

The plan now is that I’ll have a district nurse coming to see me twice a week to take a blood sample, and I’ll be summoned back to hospital in a week or so for a scan. Once they’ve assimilated all of the results, they’ll call me in again to discuss what they might be able to do for me.

But last night, with the difficulties that I’d had the previous evening, I was in bed by 20:00 and fell asleep while I was watching a film. As a result I was awake before the dawn chorus started. This morning’s blood sample was a farce – it took 5 goes and 2 nurses to find a vein that worked. I’m looking even more like a dartboard now.

This morning I was left pretty much to my own devices but it all kicked off this afternoon. They came to change my pochette of vitamins, only to discover that my right arm was incredibly swollen – no wonder it was hurting so much – and so they had to fit the drain in my left arm. And then I had another 2 pochettes of blood. I also had a biopsy, where they chipped a bit of bone off my pelvis to take away for examination and that’s the most painful thing that I have ever experienced.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The young Eurasian student nurse came to take my blood pressure this afternoon and with the drain having been moved, she needed to reach my other arm. Her solution to this was to lean right across me, in her low-cut nurse’s uniform with no t-shirt on underneath.
“Ohh – your blood pressure is up, and your pulse is racing a little”
“Really?” I replied. “I can’t think why”

Clearly I’m not as ill as I think that I am.

Sunday 22nd November 2015 – THINGS HAVE A HABIT OF WORKING …

… themselves out if you let them, no matter how unlikely it might seem at the time.

My plan about getting off to sleep didn’t work at all because it wasn’t long that I was awoken by the earth-shattering roar of a VC 10 taking off just about 8 feet from my ear, and that was that. At 04:00 the night nurse came round on her rounds and by this time, having had quite enough, I told her quite plainly that I wasn’t going to spend a third night like this. If another room couldn’t be found for me, I was going to discharge myself and that would be that.

Mind you, I must have had something by the way of sleep because I was at Dover during the night, standing on the concrete pan that was formerly the hovercraft terminal (which isn’t there) looking at a huge storm breaking over an island just offshore (that isn’t there either) and watching a group of boys trying to encourage a group of young girls to join in.

But anyway, after breakfast, and I was flat-out exhausted, my neighbour was having an “issue” with the medical staff, something to do with the question of having a shower. There was some unpleasantness involved in this discussion and it ended round about lunchtime by him dressing and leaving the room.

Later on that afternoon, while I was having my next blood transfusion, a team of nurses came in, stripped my neighbour’s bed and started to clean all around his side of the room. It appears that, quite astonishingly, my neighbour has decided to discharge himself, and he’s cleared off home.

There are no admissions scheduled for today, and so unless there’s an emergency during the night I’m going to be on my own tonight. That means that I’ll be having a good night’s sleep (I hope) and so I’ll be fit for whatever the world can throw at me tomorrow.

Saturday 21st November 2015 – HELL!

Yes, it looks as if I’ve arrived in hell.

I can cope with most things, including hospital food, but sleep is quite important for me too and while I don’t particularly need a lot, I just become miserable and in a bad mood the less sleep I have.

And this is why I am miserable and in a foul temper right now, because my neighbour is a big guy and has the loudest snore that I have ever encountered. Sleep is totally impossible if he’s dropped off and I am going to be having a long, sad stay in this hospital.

The prognosis isn’t all that good either. The three pochettes of blood that I had last night have done some good. I’m supposed to have a blood-count of 15 or so for my haemoglobin and I now have 5.8, which is a far cry from the 3.8 that I had when I arrived. No wonder that I’ve been so exhausted and pale just recently. But even this improvement is far from adequate and so the transfusions will have to continue.

Talking of hospital food though, I spent about 20 minutes last night talking about my diet to the admissions doctor, and another 15 minutes this morning to my personal doctor. And so for lunch they have brought me a chicken dinner.

I had a nice surprise this afternoon though. Liz put in an appearance with a big bag of grapes and we had quite a long chat. That cheered me up considerably. What also cheered me up is that winter has arrived. It’s -5°C outside and we’ve had the first snows of the year, and I’m inside in the comparative warmth being waited on hand and foot by a bevy of beautiful nurses. So there’s an up-side for everything.

After Liz left, I had tea. And for some reason, the boiled potatoes in their jacket smeared with vegetable margarine was the nicest thing that I have ever eaten.

So now I’m off for an early night. Liz brought some ear plugs for me and I’ve fitted them. If I can fall asleep before my neighbour, I might stand a chance.

Friday 20th November 2015 – AHH WELL!

So here I am.

It’s 08:00 in the morning and I crawl (and I do mean crawl) out of bed. I can safely say that I’ve never felt as bad as all of this. Getting down to Caliburn was something of a struggle and I’m sure that I couldn’t see straight as I drove down to Pionsat for my blood test. A surprise awaited me at the reception of the medical centre – on duty was one of the girls who runs the pie hut at FCPSH.

So having dealt with the blood test, I staggered back here and had my breakfast (luckily I’d prepared it before I went off) and then crashed out on the sofa.

I managed a coffee at about midday and then crashed out again, to be awoken by the telephone at 14:30. It was the doctor. “You have a very bad case of anaemia and you need to go to the hospital at once. I’ve prepared a file for you and there’s an ambulance voucher here at the office”

An ambulance voucher is one thing, but finding an ambulance is something else. In the end I ring up Terry and Liz, but they are out, but Rosemary is in and so she comes to the rescue. I have just about enough strength to throw a few things into a bag and then we are off.

At the hospital I check in, but I don’t even have enough time to find a seat before I’m whisked off into an emergency room and stuck on a bed. They couple me up to a vitamin tube and give me a good interrogation – and after about an hour, the blood arrived.

I had one “pochette” of blood in the emergency room and then they took me up to a room where they gave me two others.
“We have to check your blood pressure every 15 minutes during the transfusion process” explained the nurse.
“I’m a very light sleeper” I replied
“Well you are going to be in for a very long night” she answered.
And she was right.