Trendy
I had no idea I was part of a design trend when I proposed that we avoid using cabinets in our kitchen. Ach, maybe I’ve missed my calling as an interior designer.
Chapter 3
All in all, I stayed in the private room for around four days. When they took my drain out, they warned me it might hurt, but mostly it feels weird.
And how! I can’t explain just how peculiar having a long plastic tube pulled from inside your abdomen feels. The strangeness is compounded by how long it goes on for — that felt like a lot of tubing, I ran out of breath to exhale while they were doing it. But it was out, and I was almost free. Getting the catheter out took another couple of days. And now I know how catheters stay inside a person. Something I never intended to find out, but there you go.
I knew I was definitely getting better (even if my digestive system was only working to rule) when they announced they were moving me to a four-bed ward. I still had IV drips of various descriptions, though — antibiotics, Paracetamol, plain old sodium chloride. My arms had swollen and my hands felt twice their normal size, with the skin stretched so tight they were beginning to hurt. It hadn’t even occurred to me that this might happen, and I tried to start moving my hands and fingers.
Yeah. My feet and ankles were pudgy, too. My knees were obese.
The result of my swollen hands and arms was that when they needed to put in a new cannula, they couldn’t find a vein. And they needed to put in new cannulas a few times because the old ones would stop working. I had one on the back of each hand at one point. Then the one on my right hand started leaking, so it was removed (yay! One hand free).
All this time, I’d been telling the doctors and nurses to use my right arm for the various needle-led indignities they were putting me through as I’m left-handed. Sadly, they seemed to favour my left arm instead. The cannula in my left hand finally gave out, and the last one was inserted into the crook of my left elbow late one evening.
Passing of an era
Oh noes! Neil’s trusty laptop has pretty much died. It gave him wonderful service for over six years. A moment of silence, please.
Chapter 2
One side effect of laparoscopy is a lot of wind gets trapped inside the body. The only thing that can help is movement. Unfortunately, the two subsequent laparotomies meant movement was not an option. There was no #parp# in my world, only so much bloating that my abdomen was incredibly stretched. I also hadn’t eaten in days, so even if I could move, I didn’t have the energy to do it. It’s amazing how miserable I felt, especially since there was nothing anyone could do. I actually wanted to die, it was so painful and exhausting.
But there was good news. I was moved to a normal ward on day three or four, but into a private room as I was still feeling pretty rough. I had a drain (i.e. a tube inserted in my belly) and a catheter (you know what that’s for), which made any independent movement highly unlikely. I started drinking some water. I started drinking some juice. I tried a ‘building-up’ milkshake as well.
Bad idea. Laparotomies pretty much paralyse your bowels (my mother’s description) because they’ve been royally fucked with (my description, but all it really means is they’ve been handled so they go on strike). So while I was starving and trying to nourish myself, nothing was moving down there. I vomited for two nights, spewing green bile into these paper pulp bowls, all the while feeling hungry with a bloated abdomen. So it was Nil By Mouth and I was kept hydrated purely by IV drip.
That was a long 24 hours. But then I demonstrated that I could keep water down, and the doctor pronounced a distinct increase in bowel sounds (such sweet music to my ears). And then I had to go to the toilet. The less said of that, the better!
I was definitely on the mend, however. Enough that I could be seated in one of those amazing chairs (you know the kind, it angles itself all over the place so it almost tips you out of the chair when you want to get out) and sort of have a conversation with another patient, Lilian, who’d decided that all the nurses and doctors were crooks and she was not going to cooperate, but would stay in my room instead. She was merely elderly and confused, but she sure put up a good fight.
Histamines!
To add insult to recovery, both my forearms suffered a massive outbreak of urticaria last night that lasted several hours. Was it something I ate?
Reaping the whirlwind
Neil and I (aka Niall Ferguson groupies) have been watching The War of the World online. Highly recommended.
Chapter 1
I had an ectopic pregnancy. Sadly, I didn’t display a common symptom, which is severe pain in one side of my abdomen. I felt nothing. So when I went for an ultrasound scan I was not expecting to be told that my right ovary looked odd. I was way more prepared to be told that I had miscarried (75% of pregnancies end in miscarriage). I was sent home (after they took some blood, and had a long discussion with the registrar) and told to come back the next day for a follow-up scan.
To cut the long story short, I did not get a scan. I was admitted into the emergency gynaecology ward instead, which mainly involved sitting around and waiting. I then found out I was to undergo laparoscopic surgery to investigate this ‘possible’ ectopic pregnancy. Fine, fine, whatever.
I’ve never been admitted to hospital. I’ve certainly never had any sort of surgery. I was pretty relaxed about the whole thing, even when they wheeled me into the anaesthesia suite to get put under. I figured, whatever. Laparascopic surgery isn’t a huge deal, I’ll be fine. Then I was out.
When I woke up, I didn’t feel too good. The next… 20 hours or so were pretty hazy. I remember being in a lot of discomfort (I don’t really recall feeling great pain) and having a doctor and nurses around me, and me telling the doctor seated to my right that he needed to call Neil to tell him what was going on — I must have been told that I was going back into surgery. I even gave him the number. I think Neil was with me (as it turns out, in the High Dependency Unit or HDU, which is a step down from Intensive Care) when I woke up, but it didn’t feel like too long before I was wheeled back downstairs to be operated on for the third time. I remember anaesthetic being given to me in theatre itself.
(Oh yeah, and blood transfusions. I had those. Three? Four?)
After three surgeries, I eventually ended up back in the HDU for a couple of days. Neil tells me that my drain bottle (more on that later) was full of blood when they sent me back for laparotomy number two (i.e. surgery number three). From what I’ve been able to gather since, in talking to the consultants involved, is that the ectopic pregnancy had ruptured, and instead of being located in the Fallopian tube, where the vast majority are located, my fertilised ovum had actually attached itself to the ovary, basically showing that the genetic trait of having no sense of direction had already been passed on.
(Just for statistics’ sake, approximately one in 100 pregnancies are ectopic, and there is only a 0.2% chance of that ectopic pregnancy being ovarian.)
Re-open the Web
When The Killing’s Done
TC Boyle does a great job skewering the hypocrites who sully noble ideals (or exposing the reality of supposedly higher callings, I suppose). He tackled immigration in The Tortilla Curtain, and he’s done it again for animal rights in When The Killing’s Done.
We start by meeting Beverly, who’s on a boat and not feeling too good. Her boat is wrecked and she spends days marooned on an island with nothing but rats for company (not a spoiler, this is mentioned in the flap). We then meet Alma, Beverly’s granddaughter, who now has the unenviable job of exterminating the rats from said island. She encounters opposition from animal rights activists Dave LaJoy and his girlfriend Anise Reed. Their lives connect in interesting ways throughout the novel, which flashes back to the Forties and Seventies, too.
Now. This novel had a little more ‘action’ than I anticipated in a Boyle story, but I like to be surprised. I did not expect to feel such visceral dislike for LaJoy, however. I suspect not everyone would experience such an immediate disgust, but I recognised his self-serving, self-rationalising narcissism and vindictiveness. Let’s just say I know someone who’s just like that.
Election shenanigans
This is why I love YouTube. You wouldn’t have seen this sort of thing at any previous Nomination Day. (Thanks to my sister for telling me about it.)
I’m back! Sort of. My newly-varied life didn’t take me away from this site; surgery did.
Chronicles of Ancient Darkness
A bit of a departure — I’m doing a quick review of a series of YA fantasy-type books. I’ve just started working with the series’ online community, and I wouldn’t have joined up if it wasn’t a series worth recommending.
The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness traces a few years in the life of Torak, a young boy who lives in the Stone Age. Yup, no metal tools and lots of flint. It opens with Wolf Brother, when Torak suffers a great loss (not a spoiler) and befriends a wolf cub.
I can’t (and don’t want to) say much more about the plot(s) as it would take some of the fun out of the series, but the slightly mystical nature of the book titles does mean there’s a little ‘magic’ in it. I did think that — if these books had been published when I was a child — I would have loved them. Torak and his companions go on amazing adventures (some of them are actually quite scary), but what would have captivated me was the descriptions of all the bushcraft Stone Age people would have likely used regularly in order to hunt and survive fairly comfortably.
Therefore, I would think that anyone who enjoys camping, was in the Scouts, or is a Ray Mears / Bear Grylls fan would really get into this series of novels, adult or child. All I wanted to do was get out there and see if building shelters like Torak did would really work, but then I live in a town and the vegetation described isn’t really, er, available.
(I did spend my childhood feeling hard done by because I didn’t have crimes and mysteries to solve like the Famous Five, Secret Seven, Three Investigators, and Nancy Drew. Yeah. Poor me, living in a safe and comfortable suburb with a minimal threat of death and disease, with no bad guys to ferret out.)
What I think would be the only thing that marks this series out as YA is the inevitable relationship that forms between Torak and a girl he meets. All successful YA seems to have it — Lyra and whatshisname in His Dark Materials (that one did make me cringe a little), Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley and Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger in, er, Harry Potter. What makes a good YA series is how the author deals with the relationship, I suppose. *Spoiler* I like that Torak and his leading lady form a real partnership outside of any romantic-type feelings for each other — neither should feel inferior nor less worthy, but they are protective and caring, even though they make mistakes. A good set of principles for real teenagers learning to form healthy relationships, I think.
And a final note on how Michelle Paver (the author) shows the sensitivity these Stone Age people have for the environment. They revered it. I really liked how it was all about balance and cycles. Sure, some things were clearly pure superstition, but there was a real respect for nature and an understanding that people can’t just keep taking and taking without giving a thought to the future.