fajrdrako | Something like human...

I am typing this with my very own hands at my very own computer. In my living room. Sitting up and everything. The budgies are behind me, cheeping encouragement. I may not be sitting here long; The Foot is feeling rather heavy, but we're coping.

I haven't had a chance to go back and answer any of my messages, but I will. Probably not soon. Last night

maaseru printed off everyone's messages to me and I was really thrilled and delighted to get them to read. Like having a whole pile of greeting cards all at once. I was chuffed. It means a lot.

So: busy and active day here. Hectic, even. Went with walker to bathroom and back. Did it again. Repeat as necesary. Read a page of something. Fell asleep again. Repeat as necessary. This is one reason to try sitting up at the computer for a while: I presumably won't fall asleep immediately if I'm still upright. Right? Hmm: there might be a logical fallacy here.

So: shall I natter on with my account of the hospital experience?

First, admission. The neighbours who picked me up off the sidewalk and drove me to the General Hospital left me in ER about 8:30 a.m. It is a depressing room full of quiet, frightened people who are in pain. I phoned

maaseru and tried not to sound depressed or frightened or in pain. She offered to bring me a McDonald's breakfast, for which she deserves a Nobel Prize at the very least. Sadly, I never got to eat it.

I had no sooner accepted her offer than I was wheeled into the first ER assessment place. They took off my boot. "Where does it hurt?" they asked.

That was where I made my mistake. I looked at my foot. The thing that used to be my foot. I was still hoping till that moment that this was 'just a bad sprain', you see. Time to abandon all hope of that. Bones that used to be neatly at 180^o were at 45^o and didn't even match up with each other.¹ Way gross.

I did what any sensible person would do: I fainted. First I waved my hand towards the whole misshapen object (now to be known as The Foot) vaguely said, "there". Didn't quite keel over, but almost. They handed me water and painkillers. They whapped an oxygen supply onto my nose and wheeled me - somewhere. Six or seven hours later, a nurse asked me why I had an oxygen tube on my nose. "I guess they thought I needed it," I said. "But it isn't attached," they said, dangling the unattached end in the air. They left it on my face, though, just in case... something.

I was transferred to a high-tech bed, maybe the ominous Stryker. The doctor asked if I minded if they used me to teach some medical students about my condition. "Fine," said I, and they came in - eight students with their clipboards, looking like Martha Jones in "Smith and Jones", thoughtful and studious. They were almost all Asian, and female, and all were beautiful. Are doctors chosen for their looks these days? I tried very hard not to hear what the doctor was saying about my foot, as he explained about the bones and their misalignment and breakage, and I thought, don't wanna know don't wanna know don't wanna know. Then he finished up, "One thing about this particular kind of injury, it hurts like hell." And to me he added, "Isn't that right?"

"Yup," I agreed amiably. "Hurts like hell."

Then they put me under anaesthetic to fix the dislocation. After I woke up, X-rays. A long wait in my Stryker bed, then more X-rays. When I came back from one of the X-ray sessions, there was

maaseru in the Clinical Decision Unit, waiting for me. Things got much more interesting for a while. I couldn't eat the McDonald's breakfast, though - no food before surgery. Or water. Nothing. A long thirsty day on an intravenous drip. Eventually

maaseru left and I lay there, thinking.

I knew I was in the Clinical Decision Unit because there was a big sign about ten feet from my nose that said Clinical Decision Unit and if I turned my head the right way, and looked though the curtains around the other beds, I could see another sign on the door that said CDU. I wished it was DCU, but it wasn't, though I liked the idea that the superheroes of the DC Universe might be on the other side of that door. Drugs, right?

I was thinking many profound thoughts. After a few hours it occurred to me that my thoughts, though mellow, were not so much profound as just drug-induced. Here I was in a large room full of total strangers, and I knew all about their bowel movements. Which might be gross or weird, but it seemed deeply comforting. All of us, both linked and separated by all these fragile bodies we have. Reduce us to our common frailties and we're really all rather lovable and inderdependent. All these people trying to help each other out as best they can. Everybody coping as well as possibly, despite pain, despite fear, despite understaffing. The place was a jumble but it all seemed to utimately work - those who needed to be comforted were comforted, they found one last pillow to put under my foot to keep it comfortably raised - as the foot of my bed slowly sunk downwards.

So you're on your way to work one day, rushing to get to the bus ontime , but not recklessly. You're a self-sufficient adult. Then wham a patch of ice, and you're helpless. And that's when the amazing things start to happen. A whole series of events with you at their centre but completely outside your volition or control. Things just... happen. Neighbours see you, bundle you into your car, and take you to the hospital. There they look at The Foot, they give you pain-killers and put you into a bed, and then it's an ongoing series of events - different rooms, different people, different questions, different instructions, but it all goes on happening, and the machinery of the medical profession puts me together again till you're well enough to come home and sit in my own living room with the budgies.

And it all happens because we are all so interdependent, all the time, everywhere. And the infrastructure is there because accidents happen and life is chancy, and it could be anyone, any time, with an icy sidewalk or any other common peril. Which is why taking care of each other is so important.

There was a family there in the CDU - no, maybe not a family, a group of people - I thought were quite fascinating. There was an old man, 96 years old, in Emergency for an abscess on his back and pneumonia. He's had a stroke in February. His visitors were all Asian and well-dressed and so respectful of him - though he was mostly asleep and didn't say much through their visits, but would acknowledge their presence as best he could. Each time one of the group would arrive, they'd quietly discuss who had been there earlier, and who was coming later. They didn't talk a lot. The nurse asked about his condition before the stroke - did he cough when he tried to eat, sometimes? Yes, he did. She explained that in people his age sometimes food gets down the windpipe and ultimately infects the lungs. "He never complained," said one of the visitors. "He always said he was all right." You could see their concern. Had they paid enough attention to the old man? Was there anything they could have or should have done that they didn't?

There was a woman who came in a few hours after me, with the same problem: she'd slipped on the ice, broken and dislocated her ankle. She had a lot to say. She phoned all her friends, making a dramatic story about her accident: "It was the worst pain I'd ever had," she'd enthuse, and I found that rather irritating, though I had a hard time figuring out why. I felt concern and compassion for everyone else in the room - and goodness knows, she had the right to deal with her pain in any way that comforted. What's wrong with telling people about it? I decided it was because she made it into an ego game - not the shared fragility of mankind that I was musing about, but a ploy for personal sympathy. At one point I head the nurse Caroline ask her if she was all right. "I'm bored," the woman said flatly. It occurred to me that I could have offered to compare our relative bits of ceiling; I'd been staring at my corner of the ceiling tiles for hours, and could have found out whether the ones above her were any different. I suppose it might have been difficult to explain to her why I found the idea so amusing.

At another point she complained loudly to the nurse that she'd been waiting for surgery for more than four hours, and couldn't they rush things a little? Caroline explained patiently that they would take her up as soon as they could, but, she added pointedly, "Elizabeth will go first, she's been waiting longer." I wanted to high-five her. Caroline was a saint: she was working a twelve-hour shift and someone hadn't turned up for work and she brought me a bed pan three times when she didn't even have to, but the real bed pan person kept disappearing. One of life's little unfairnesses: on an IV drip, even if you can't drink, you have to pee. I turned into a water processing machine.

They'd run out of the signs that attach to the beds to say where they're supposed to be - I'll swear the Stryker arranged that - so the orderlies wrote in pen on my pillow where the bed was supposed to be.

Surgery, when I finally got there about 9:30 pm, was high-tech and incredibly quiet. An attendant doctor named Louise took me through the long list of questions I'd already been asked a dozen time, and to "do you have any medical allergies?" I answered, as I always did, "Just eye drops." All the other people I'd said that to said, "Well, we won't be giving you those," but Louise said, "What was in them?"

How should I know? Random instances over decades, long ago - drops they said had 'no active ingredients', but I always ended up having seizures from them anyway. "We can't do any surgery unless we know," said Louise, and went away. Great, thought I'd they'd rather just cut off my leg, or what? After a while there was another surgeon - this one looked like a young Timothy Callahan, what did I say about doctors being beautiful? - came with an identical clipboard, asked if I had any allergies, and I said, "Eye drops." "We won't be giving you any," he said, and that was that.

But Louise won my heart in the end, because just as they were putting me under she said kindly, "Don't worry, we'll take good care of you." And they did.

~ ~ ~

¹ Truthfully, as I fell onto that sidewalk, I saw the leg bone move in a way no leg bone is ever supposed to bend. But I was in denial. I preferred to disbelieve my own eyes till that last hope was gone. Ever the optimist.

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From:

silverwhistle.livejournal.com

Ouch! You poor thing! This is exactly the thing I was terrified of happening to me about 3 years ago (falling downstairs at work), only that was just a bad sprain, thanks to my robust boots.

I'm glad you had æsthetically pleasing medical help! Eye-candy makes one feel better!

I shall be thinking of you when I watch the Torchwood finale tonight, and shall try to phone at the weekend.

From:

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Something like human...

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