DIY Recovery

 27 hours after my admission to hospital I was discharged. Shuffling diminutively down the long hospital corridor, I clutched a green plastic bag containing a box of opioids and a week's supply of anti-coagulant injections. The opioids have the usual warning not to drive or operate machinery whilst under their influence. I'm not sure if operating a computer counts but on the basis that the original English Opium Eater, Thomas de Quincey, could write whilst floating in a cloud of laudanum, I'm taking the view that it's worth a try.

Well I'll be honest I'm not in as much pain as I envisaged and whilst my insides at this very moment are presumably lying on a butcher's block in a path lab somewhere, the surgeon did call onto the ward to tell me that he had seen nothing suspicious only confirmation of a pair of active ovaries!

I confess I don't recall much of my first 15 hours in the hospital, save for the first hour of fear when, like all full blooded cowards, I considered locking myself in the toilet but somehow or other raised the courage to walk along to the anaesthetic room unaided. Suitably drugged up, the next thing I remember was coming round 3 hours later in a post surgery ward where trolleys arrived and left with the regularity of an inter city railway station. It was all I could do to open my eyes occasionally and stare blurry eyed across the room at an ever changing procession of nurses and patients.

By evening I was becoming more aware and settled down to a sleep-over in a side ward with 4 ladies of  the most pleasant disposition taking into account our circumstances. Whilst the ward next door was a countenance of peace and contentment all night, ours was a blissful interchange of  conversation, sickness, bladder issues and insomnia. I take my hat off to the two nurses on duty who tended to us throughout and even arranged for a supper of sandwiches and fruit jelly to be served just when we all needed it, not to mention countless cups of tea and jugs of water, in between blood pressure readings, more covid tests and the administration of pain relief.

Of course they don't lose much time in letting you out the next morning and with 9 pages of instructions on what to do and what not to do, I was back at home before lunch yesterday. I thought I'd got away pain free (there's that retirement optimism I've been cultivating) until I realised that whatever I'd been pumped full of in theatre was wearing off and reached for the codeine, although fortunately I clearly don't need as much as has been prescribed.

Of greater concern was finding this object still attached. 

Commonsense tells me they forgot to remove all the components from ECG monitoring. The opioids and bloating convince me I've been converted into an enormous rubber doll with an airhead, gas filled abdomen and that this is the valve for pumping me up. As for the bruising near my ears and below my cheek bones, I thought I might have been in the boxing ring, but my sister in law who manages a surgical ward, tells me they probably had to do a jaw thrust to keep my airway open. Actually with bruising on my chest too I'm certain that, after I was blown up to look like the Michelin Man, somebody exerted too much pressure trying to deflate me. Perhaps it's as well that there are some things we are just never meant to know.

 

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