Well, there I was re-reading my last entry (I do that you know to spot all those typos that slip through the net*1) and realised that I never said how I managed to do too much, which was a pity when it was done for the best possible reason – we had a party!
Now we had a smallish party this year (yes, we do have one most years) but of course all our best friends came (the A list ones as the BUF would say) and yet again I am reminded of what a great bunch of people they are. Now this could just be because if they weren’t great they wouldn’t be my friends (I think this a comment about them, not me) but anyway we like to see them and catch up and all that kind of stuff that you do at parties. What’s even better is the fact that after a late night (only 1.30am in my case) you come down in the morning and they have got stuck into comparing their dishpan hands and the kitchen is all clean and tidy. Thanks guys….
Even with a pretty small group of people, with some similar interests too, I am always surprised at the random nature of some of the conversations that take place. At one point, the conversation turned to fashion phases when we were young. I admitted to being a punk and no-one admitted to ever wearing any kind of Bay City Roller tartan outfit (but yes, I suspect I know who they are…). Anyway, ND (New Dad) was talking about his wife (NDW):
ND: “She went through a Goth phase you know”
AORL*2…: “Oh…??”
ND: “Well, she wasn’t really too Goth, more of a half Goth…”
AORL: “So what does a half Goth wear?”
VNSO*3: Grey….
…a certain amount of chortling ensued….
*1…and slip through and slop through…
*2 Any other random listener
*3: see here
Today has not been one of my best days and there may be a little sneaky voice inside me that is telling me that maybe I just did too much over the weekend. Of course, there is also a much louder more insistent voice that is saying ‘don’t be daft, you just slept awkward’, but I don’t really believe it. You see I woke up stiff, err, that would be very stiff and eventually (with the aid of my bed leaver) managed to roll myself over and stare bleakly at the curtains. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; it looked like sunshine – the other side of my curtains, in Britain, where we have had nothing but rain for what seems like an eternity. I was certain, I was sure that in the dim recesses of my memory I remember something called sun and it looked just like that! So, I willed myself to leap out of bed and run to the curtains, pull them back with enthusiasm and verve and rush out to cut the grass or something. Did it happen? Nope – remember, I was stiff, so I cussed a bit and rolled back over and gave in to lying there for another hour until I felt able to get up and go – all the time desperately hoping that the sun wouldn’t by then have got up and went!
Ah yes, for those of you wondering if it did, it didn’t. I am sitting here with sun streaming through the window feeling like I should be doing stuff but (just for once) being sensible given the start I had today. It does remind you though that you may have had half a Meccano set fixed inside you but the surgeons were right - it’s not a cure for everything – and it’s only supposed to stop you getting worse. I am now fast approaching my 18 month mark (8th August) and will do a full update then, but it’s worth bearing in mind if you’re considering surgery yourself.
I have been away again but this time nowhere terribly exotic I’m afraid. I went just about 3 hours away from home (by car!) which coincidentally is just down the road from where A & T live (remember them?).
I was supposed to be there from Wednesday to the following Monday and had been looking forward to it for months. The event is in the middle of summer and every year so far has been baking hot. You compete, catch some rays and generally have a good time.
Well, I suppose I shouldn’t have been quite so optimistic given the weather than we have had lately but I am a real optimist (have a mentioned that before?) and so with cries of ‘don’t be silly’ to every weather forecaster and ‘it’ll be fine’ to every gainsayer I travelled up to the event. Now it has to be said that a healthy dose of pragmatism does creep into my optimism, so I did pack my waterproofs, but all the same I fully expected the weather to
- be fine or
- be awful somewhere else but not where I was!
Day 1 was fine, bright and sunny and I rolled up my sleeves and watched the pale people turning lobster coloured. I chilled and enjoyed and had ice cream and cake with A&T on an afternoon off. Just as I had predicted, the weather looked lovely!
Day 2 dawned wet and I mean wet. Rain was coming down like stair rods and drops were bouncing 3 feet off the pavement but, since (as I have already said), I am an optimist, I fully expected that by lunchtime (when I had to go out in it) that the rain would have stopped and the sun would have come out. In the event, I guess I was almost right, as the rain did (eventually) stop that afternoon. The only thing was, that it was not before the river (which ran right down the side of the field that we were in) had burst its banks. One minute I was sat out on the field in my wheelchair thinking ‘I’m sure there wasn’t any water on the running track a minute ago’, and the next the water table seemed to be rising up to meet me. In ten minutes, the water had reached me and I was trying to back-pedal furiously. Of course, that is not to say that a wheelchair has pedals you understand, but I was on the retreat.
Now I started to retreat by going forwards (of course I turned round to face the other way first, otherwise that statement would make no sense at all…) and some very helpful chap decided to help by giving me a gentle push. Well, you know that thing where you are trying to be genteel and polite and so you feel the need to stop and you say quietly ‘please stop’, then ‘please stop’ (slightly louder) and then BLOODY WELL STOP WILL YOU!?’ – No? Well, if not, I’m sure you have the picture, it was one of those moments exactly! You see the nice helpful chap seemed to be ploughing some kind of a furrow in the mud with my front wheels and was in danger of hitting bedrock and tipping me out. Now I don’t mind being tipped out of my wheelchair, the BMB has done it and so has hubby and so has even my physio, so I figure I’m fair game, but into the mud – no way, especially not with me with a white shirt on too! After that, it was a bit of very undignified dragging backwards for me to escape the rising tide.
Well, with all these shenanigans, the water wasn’t waiting and as fast as I was back-pedalling (see earlier note) the water was catching me. In the end, the entire field, including the running track surrounding it was completely under 4” of water and yes that is inches of water – deeper too in some places! It took just half an hour from ‘oh isn’t that water’ to ‘OMG abandon ship!’.
I’m beginning to doubt that this really is summer – I think its some kind of government conspiracy where they made us all sleep for 5 months and are now trying to gloss over the fact that they let a deadly hibernation sickness loose in the nation.
So, here it goes, I am going to boast some just ‘cos I impressed even myself last week.
Hubby and I had been out for the day and when we got home there was a car sized space directly outside our house. I was driving hubby’s car which is rather bigger than mine and in my optimistic little way decided that I could get the car in there even though the space looked a touch on the small side. Well, the other option was to park on the other side of the street and we had stuff to unpack and it was raining too – what would you have done?
I reversed in (parallel like) and wiggled back and forth a few times until I seemed to be about in – it was a real ‘thank God I’ve got power steering’ moment but eventually I turned off the engine happy with where I was. I got out and looked at the kerb - both front and back tyres touching the kerb – good! Then hubby peers around first the front, then the back of the car – he looks impressed and then decides to measure the gaps. So, there was 8” at the front of the car to the car in front and 4” at the back of the car to the car behind. That’s a space just one foot longer than the car and I managed to get in it and end up parallel and close to, the kerb. Truly I was impressed.
There, boasting over, I shan’t do it again!
Well, just as a quick update, the FIL is recovering quite well. He’s out of HDU and back onto a regular ward. It seems to be little thanks to the hospital who are largely leaving him alone and apparently just hoping that he will all heal up and get stronger on his own. “What about physio?” we asked last night only to be told that they weren’t going to bother with any. “Oh”, the nurse said airily, “all that can be done once we transfer him to the local hospital”. “And when will that happen?”(We asked) – “Hmmm…” she said. “How long is a piece of string?”
Actually that’s not what she said at all, what she said was that they would transfer him when a bed became available and when they could get transport – presuming of course that those two things coincide – after all, he is ‘on the waiting list’ now…so everything is bound to be alright.
I shall update you in two years when he gets to the top of the list then, shall I?
As is the way of such things, the poor old FIL is back into the high dependency unit. It goes like this, late last week he was pootling along well and making good steps forward (10m forward on his Zimmer to be exact) and they decided that they would transfer him to a small local hospital for rehabilitation and physiotherapy before sending him home. So, he wakes up on Friday ready to get transferred and after a little while the hospital calls us. Now we thought that it would be to tell us when he would be arriving at the local hospital, but no, it seems he had to do things the hard way; the call was to tell us that he had started to bleed internally – from somewhere in the gut but they didn’t know where and couldn’t see from where with an endoscope. Now where all this came from we have no idea as he went in for coronary artery bypass surgery (hardly connected) but they gave us the grim news that his blood loss was so severe that they were taking him down to surgery and did not expect him to survive.
That was it, we all rushed down the hospital and proceeded to wait…and wait and wait and wait. No one told us anything; no one even offered us a cup of tea. We waited and occasionally chased the staff who said there was no news and a doctor would come and see us (soon!). We waited some more and then were eventually told that he had come through the operation fine and was in recovery waiting to be transferred to HDU. A while later someone took us down to the HDU waiting room and we had only been in there a few minutes when we were collected and taken to another waiting room over the other side of the hospital (at ITU). I was not best pleased at all the uncomfortable chairs and long walks all over the place and the MIL was suffering, but you get on with it in these circumstances, don’t you? Anyway, we were told that they would get the FIL settled and we could then go in and see him – hopefully in about 45 minutes. After an hour had passed, hubby went to see what was going on and after a half hour wait at reception he was told that they had never heard of the FIL! Eventually they tracked him down to the first place we had been taken to – we saw him (he was asleep), the nurses said they had no idea what had happened in surgery and there was still no doctor to talk to. By this time it was ten o’clock at night and we were told to go home and come back in the following day after lunch to see what was going on!
The long and the short of it is this – they opened him up and found nothing wrong. The bleeding had stopped on its own so they stitched him back together and are keeping him in HDU for a couple of days to keep an eye on him. So, here he is, nearly 80 years old, being cut open for no reason – I’m sure that’ll speed his recovery up no end.
Grrr, do you get the feeling that I think the NHS really stinks sometimes?
It suddenly occurred to me that I had left the FIL in Intensive Care – permanently it seems….and that you were all out there still holding your breath and praying. Well, I started to fret about this last night – how could I have been so mean to all my cyberspace friends – how many of them were now blue, red or even by this stage (heaven forbid) green…
Anyway, I am delighted to report good news for the family as the FIL responded well (if a little slowly) to all the treatment he received in the Intensive Care Unit. So much so that he was transferred to a regular ward at the end of last week – they had done a great job all ways round with him. Of course, I personally think that to spend a month in Intensive Care is a little bit of an extreme way to get over the initial agonies of an operation, but hey, it seemed to work. His chest has all healed well and the bypass has been a great success. Not bad at all for a 79 year old (albeit one who was pretty active before all this happened). He managed to get some pretty good hallucinations too*1 and has kept us all highly amused with his stories of saving babies from burning buildings and Fred Flintstone appearing in a porno movie!
All this is good news but his progress is very slow. I think sometimes hospitals make it very easy to simply not try hard enough. He is mostly just sitting back and waiting for his recovery to happen to him without putting in any more effort than he has to. For example, he was disappointed after being transferred to the ward that no-one would feed him – despite the fact that he (albeit slowly) was able to manage a spoon to feed himself. If something is hard work then he would prefer to simply not bother doing it or get someone else to do it for him. It’s true, he is still pretty weak from the extended hospital stay, but yet more inactivity is hardly building him up. I personally find it very frustrating – a little over a year ago I was trying to get back on my feet after my surgery and yet every day set myself a new target so that I could improve as fast as possible. Now, I really don’t want to sound harsh or impatient with him and I know that I am younger and maybe this helped me, but I fear that he now sees himself as a permanent invalid. His surgery, which was supposed to give him a better quality of life, and which has been an incredible success, has been sidelined by his talk of “I don’t care if I can’t ever get around without a zimmer” and “I suppose I’ll have to have the optician and hairdresser come to the house now”…
Aaargh! Is it just me? Am I being unreasonable with the guy? I guess the truth of it all is that its hard when you are eternally pragmatic optimist and you come up against a real dyed in the wool pessimist - especially one with 79 years of practice.
*1I was incredibly disappointed with my stay in hospital, which, despite copious quantities of morphine, had no more exciting dreams than usual. So not fair – go through all that getting cut in half business and not even a good hallucination to tell people about!
So, yet again I was away (I seem to that a lot, don’t I?) and early one morning (well, it seemed that way to me*1) we were out in a field in the cold and damp. Now, just so you don’t get the wrong idea about where I go when I am away, sometimes its really nice, like earlier in the year in the States, when all we had to contend with was the searing desert heat, strong wind, cactus spikes (great for wheelchair tyres), snakes and scorpions – but more often than not, it is in some field in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of England and it’s cold, windy and often raining! Anyway, having set the scene before all those ramblings (cold, damp, middle of a field remember?) we were all trying our best to look bright eyed and bushy tailed and not to be too grumpy with each other. MY (being very bright eyed and bushy tailed) did his usual thing of trying to get us all warmed up and somewhat less grumpy than we were before, by getting us to sit in a ring and do some gentle physical exercise. Of course, this rarely works, as when we are cold and grumpy the last thing we all want to do is physical exercise (personally my thoughts turn to duvets and hot coffee), but there you go, it has to be done so we do it. It doesn’t mean we are quiet about it – oh no, there’s lots of moans and groans and MY comes in for a certain amount of abuse, but he gives as good as he gets in return.
So, there we are doing our stretches 
and waving our arms around and MY then leads us on to the torso twist. I ineffectually move my arms around a bit and discover that nothing has changed, since my op I just can’t seem to turn at all. MY (cruel man) yells out – “Come on WW, twist will you?!! Well! I don’t know - anyone would think you had a rod down your back….!”
Hmmm……. very funny MY…..
*1I think that anything before around 10.30 am should be defined as stupid o’clock and anything before 9 is (as hubby puts it) “up at crack of sparrow fart” (which I always love as an expression….)
