Chris Hansen’s blog

Courtesy of HWMBO, I now have my netbook and can blog from my hospital bed. What a horrible week it’s been. To recap:

The day after my birthday, November 9, I woke up with vague pains in my joints, especially those of my right foot. As the foot clinic had seen me the previous Friday, I thought that the pain might be a sympton of swine flu, but checked that on line and probably didn’t have that. I suffered for four days, getting progressively worse, until on Friday the 13th I decided I’d better go in to the foot clinic. Lo and behold, when I got there with HWMBO the clinic found that my right foot was massively infected and the infection had spread into the bone. I was admitted to Kings College Hospital that afternoon and have been there for more than a week.

The first night on the ward was surreal. The elderly man next to me was a retired actor who had perhaps been drinking more than he should for many years. His friend (male) came every day, but he spent a restless night every night, calling out for the nurse constantly. This kind of prevented sleep.

They inserted a cannula into my right hand—this is a passageway into the vein to allow for intravenous medicines to be dripped into you. I am taking three intravenous antibiotics three times daily, and they seem to be working. The doctor says that they will install a PICC line and I can then probably go home and have intravenous antibiotics administered by a district nurse three times a day for four weeks.

They have also started me on rapid onset insulin before meals. This, in conjunction with the metformin and insulatard at night, has brought my blood sugar rapidly down to close to normal.

There is a routine on the ward. During the week the nurses go around washing patients starting at 4 am. Luckily I’m independent so I don’t have to undergo that. I get up around 5:30 and wash and shave and all that, then go back to my bed and wait for the first antibiotic bout. Once that’s over, I wait for the nurse to unhook me—they have lots of other duties and sometimes they forget. I try to be a good patient (comes from the Latin patiens, meaning suffering) and haven’t used my call bell at all so far.

Then it’s meds, insulin, and breakfast. Then the doctors descend. The big cheese foot doctor only came up once, the first day. Otherwise, his minion has been here to chart my progress.

More insulin, meds, and lunch around noon. More antiibiotics at 2. Then the wait for visitors.

If there is one thing that a hospitalised person can benefit from, it’s visitors. Life here is dull, HWMBO has come every evening except Tuesday, but other than that visitors are sparse. On Sunday the duty cover chaplain came up to administer Holy Communion, and she said she would tell the chaplaincy staff I was here, but haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since. The Area Dean came to see me, and Gill and John (the vicar of St. John’s) came later in the week and administered Communion. Ethel and Jennie from St. Matthew’s came. Otherwise, I’ve been here pretty lonely. Believe me, when someone I know is in hospital in the future, if they say they welcome visitors I will be the first one there if I can be. It is so vital to help people keep in touch with the outside world.

My ward-mates are an odd lot. The elderly actor in the next bed was supposed to go home on Monday but home help couldn’t be secured so he went home on Tuesday. He cried all Monday night. There are two drug addicts here. One is very quiet and mostly sleeps all day. The other one, Michael, is really demanding and treats the nurses like his personal wait staff. They are saints to put up with it. There is an alcoholic in the corner who is falling out of bed or weeing on the floor all the time. They keep administering dementia tests to him and he keeps failing. However, he is too young for an urgent place in a nursing home. So he is warehoused here at great expense until they find a place.

So here I sit. Don’t forget: visit your friends in hospital! Please! It’s a lifeline.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 05:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.