Coughing and Schooling

Over the last 10 years or so I have been learning things about the private primary prep school to which I went up until the age when I took the 11+ examination (which in England determined whether you went to a grammar school or a secondary modern school). The streaming system was very academically and socially divisive. 

I assume when it was thought up the idea was to stream academically minded people towards academia and university and 'the rest' to more practical education. I passed the 11+ with flying colours and was awarded the first choice of school which my parents had specified when I took the exam. 

That was Quarry Bank Grammar School in Liverpool. It was the home of many who became illustrious people. John Lennon was a few classes ahead of me. He was eccentric even at school. He also started a group at school called The Quarrymen.  However everything there was aimed at getting those who were Oxford or Cambridge material to one of those Universities.

Unfortunately at the age of around 14/15 I developed a disease called bronchiectasis.

It is a disease which is often fatal. It is often also associated with poverty and lifestyle. It is very common in the Pacific Islands. When I lived in New Zealand the niece of the then Governor General of New Zealand succumbed. She was the same age as I was when I succumbed. The difference was that she was not expected to live. She became a campaigner for better health education and lifestyle for Pacific Islanders in particular.  I believe that she died shortly after I left New Zealand.

My bronchiectasis was caused by the smogs (cloyingly thick smoke laden freezing fogs) common in cities in the UK in the '40s and '50s before the Clean Air Acts banned the use of coal in domestic fires. It had consumed the lower lobe of my right lung.

The result was that I had a wracking cough particularly during my last year at school. It was rather disruptive in class and a number of the teachers just kicked me out of the class. I joined the Natural History Society and the Beekeeping Society so that instead of just standing outside the classroom as I was bidden I went and looked after animals and bees. 

I have had a great love and respect for bees ever since. I have had a rather jaundiced opinion of teachers ever since. I left school as soon as I was legally able to. 

So far as the disease was concerned I was one of the fortunate ones. I had an operation to remove much of my right lung and I have coped admirably in the 64 years since the operation (by the surgeon Mr Leslie Temple). Oddly I can recall his name and many of the nurses I worked with in the Hospital after I left school. It's a shame I have difficulty remembering my own name these days. 

The real point of this post, though, is that teachers and 'the system' thought it was quite acceptable to deny an equal education to anyone if they felt like it. The idea of simply kicking people out of a classroom now because of a disability is, I hope, completely anathema.

The Elephant in The Room

A number of people in Blogland and also in my personal life have recently been commenting on the fact that we are all getting older and some of us are getting to the stage when there is one helluva lot more behind us than we can look forward to.

Although few of us mention it, many of my friends deep down wonder not so much how long we are going to live but how much longer we are going to function effectively physically, and in many ways far more importantly, mentally. As more and more people I know succumb to dementia of one type or another it is the condition that we all dread but all pretend is something that happens to other people. It is the untalked about elephant in the room.

My Dad was born in 1907 on 11 December so this would be his 116th birthday (and if I have the maths wrong I'm sure someone will tell me). He died at the age of 94.

I've blogged about him on a few occasions because he was a wonderful father and a lovely person.

Today's post is a little story from the last week or so of his life when he had been admitted to a nursing home as an emergency patient with chronic heart failure which meant that he was unable even to raise his hand to his mouth to give himself a drink.

On being told of his admission I drove down from the Hebrides to Liverpool and went straight to the nursing home.

Just after I arrived a Social Worker also arrived and was shown into the room. She introduced herself and said that she had come to assess my father for his suitability for the facility. 

She then started  with the usual questions "Do you know where you are and what time it is?" and so on. At that point I interjected and pointed out that this was a bizarre line of questioning for someone who was virtually blind, had no access to a clock, a radio or anything else and could not read a newspaper even if he had one and that I, who did but who had just driven from the Hebrides couldn't tell her the date, time or even what day it was.  

After she and I had exchanged a few more sentences Dad interjected:

"For heaven's sake you two!" "The date is...the day is... We had lunch about an hour ago. They presumably serve it around 1230. So it's probably about 1.30. The date is X (I never did know how on earth he knew that), and you are probably going to ask me who is on the throne and who the Prime Minister is etc etc." He then went on to answer the questions he had presumed would be asked. 

At the end of all that the Social Worker turned to me and said "Well that is you and I truly put in our place", put down her papers and started have a proper conversation with Dad and I. 

I keep clinging to the hope that as both my parents at the age of 94 and 93 had all their mental faculties there may be hope for me now that I've entered my eightieth year. 

(OK How many of you - apart from Bob if he read this - checked my maths?)

Heart Attack Time

I've just read a post by Bob (as in Mr Brague who rhymes with plague) upon an incident he had and a reminder that we should all listen to our bodies. 

Assuming you have either already read or now popped over to his post you will see that I commented as follows:

"Unlike you, when I thought I was having a heart attack (same symptoms as yours and age 56) I immediately went to the nearest doctor (I was away from home at a trade fair). He pronounced me A1 after doing all the tests. To be continued..... "   I am continuing.

Later that evening after my friends and I had been for dinner we were walking back to the place we were renting for a few days. It was a very bitter, windy October evening in Aviemore in the coldest part of the Scottish Highlands. I was breathless and when I eventually made it back I asked them to get an ambulance.

It arrived as did the local doctor I'd seen that afternoon. The general assumption was that I'd had a heart attack. I was carted off to Inverness and spent the night having tests and so on. 

In the morning I was declared A1 fit for discharge with them being able to find no indication whatsoever of a heart attack. I was very surprised but happy. However as I had nowhere to go and no clothes and no one to collect me (they were all at the trade fair 30 miles away) I was shoved into a private sideroom until the next day. During that day I wandered up and down the three flights of stairs (with the permission of the doctor!) to the ground floor, had lunch in the café and generally amused myself.

That evening my friends brought in my clothes and agreed to collect me the next morning. Whilst they were there two doctors and three nurses entered and, very accusingly, asked why, at 11pm the previous evening, I had had an ECG. No one had ordered one. 

My response made it clear that it certainly wasn't me who had asked for it and they were the medics. Apparently no ECG had been ordered so far as anyone could find. However, you guessed it, it showed quite the opposite to everything previously done. I was to go back onto the observation ward that very moment and, no, the bed would go with me in it, I was not to move a muscle until the morning.

The next morning a consultant whom I hope I never meet again came in and  told me that I was being flown to Edinburgh for an angiogram and probably angioplasty. (See sub-story below).

Next day I was duly loaded into a helicopter ambulance and flown down to Glasgow. In those days angioplasty was a much bigger job than it is today where they pop a line up your arm and bob's your uncle. So I'm told by people who have had recent stent insertions.

I found myself in a huge theatre with two consultants and heaven knows how many support staff and a television set to my left showing an x-ray view of my heart and its surrounds. This had the advantage that the consultants could see into my body and work out where the stents were going and, for me, it stopped any potential boredom. It was a long afternoon! I won't bore you with the details although some were very amusing and some were a tad unpleasant. I had 5 stents inserted. The 6th just wouldn't play ball. 

The Sub Story

I didn't know anyone in Edinburgh and it's the diagonally opposite side of the country to Lewis. I know lots of people in Glasgow and life would have been so much easier in hospital there. The Consultant was not having any of it and dismissed my request for Glasgow 'if possible pretty please" with an "I send people to Edinburgh!" Behind him the Sister gave me a kindly smile and a wink. I knew I was in good hands.  The next morning she explained that, regretfully, she hadn't been able to find a bed in the Edinburgh Hospital so I was going down to the Glasgow Western Infirmary.  

Twelve 'Lost' Days

It is 13 days since I arrived home from my last visit South when I started on the Drugs Trial and had the last attempt to get rid of Cal. It seems like and age. I know that I've done things. I remember  having my 3-monthly bum-jab to help keep C (the Big Yin, not Cal) under control and hugging Lisa when she told me I was not diabetic as had been previously diagnosed. I remember coffee one afternoon with a friend in The Woodlands. I think I was compos mentis  that afternoon - I hope that I was.  I remember long periods sleeping on my recliner or in bed. I know that I must have done a lot of other things too. However for the most part my overwhelming memory is of just not functioning and being so unwell last Sunday and Monday that I couldn't even persuade the medical practice receptionist that I really, really did need to see a doctor ungently. I must have been very non-compos mentis.

On Monday when I did see a doctor she took one look at me and rang the hospital. I emerged yesterday afternoon a tired, but new, person after enough intravenous antibiotics for an elephant and, apparently, a worrying (for others - I wasn't able to think clearly enough to care) time. Apparently the various medical teams here and in Ayr have agreed that the team here clean up my infections and next Thursday the Ayr Team will have another go at Cal.

In the meantime this evening an almost-lifelong friend who lives in Canada arrives to stay with me on her way home from Africa.

The Glad Game: 

I woke up this morning.
I didn't have MRSA and sepsis did not set in.
The medical staff at Western Isles Hospital are BRILLIANT!

I slept so soundly last night I didn't wake, turn over or even crumple the bedclothes for EIGHT hours.
My life is never, ever, boring.
I have wonderful friends and family who look out for me.

Nothing Can Go Wrong

if you don't make a plan. Hmmmm.

That was, I suppose, my mistake. Not so much that I made a plan but that I expected a plan imposed by circumstances to work out. Things started to go awry when, at a day's notice, my appointment was brought forward a day to 1st November. It was a day surgery 23 hour appointment. (ie a late afternoon procedure to be kept in overnight for observation and recovery).

I left the hospital in the afternoon 149 hours and three procedures after I entered it. The kidney stone is still there and instead of a nephrostomy bag I have a bag into which my bladder empties. 

However, whilst those 149 hours may have mucked up my arrangements they have opened my eyes to many other things:

How enormously some things have changed in medicine in the last 20 years. For example, my prostatectomy in 1998 involved major invasive  surgery, 5 days in the High Dependency Unit and weeks in hospital recovering and a very great deal of pain. This week during my 149 hours several people appeared on the ward having had a prostatectomy by keyhole surgery and were discharged a day or two later.

A nurse may come on duty at 0730 and find herself at the end of her shift trying to get a patient sorted and out of severe pain and discomfort 15 hours later, having already had a full day of  dealing with patients.

If a patient becomes a major problem on a ward in the middle of the night there's no first-line defence against violence other than calming talk and hope.

If at first you don't succeed in trying to get at a patient's embedded kidney stone through damaged tissue then just calmly move on to the next option, and then the next and then the next. Then schedule a period of R and R and tissue healing until the next try in four weeks time.

I could write enough to fill a book but this is neither the time nor the place.

Suffice to say that by Saturday night I hope to be back on Lewis and in Blogland for a week or two before coming South again.

Life With a Bag

No. It's nothing to do with human co-habitation. I've done that. Been there. Got a few tee-shirts. Which is odd because I've never worn a tee-shirt in my life.

No. This is a reference to a real bag. A receptacle for holding something: in this case, liquid. In this particular case one attached to my back into which a tube from my right kidney drains.

Why am I telling you this? “Too much information.” I hear you saying. Well I’m going to tell you anyway.

This train of thought started when I was listening to a chap on the radio or television bemoaning the fact that he had been told that his operation for prostate cancer might leave him semi-bladder-incontinent and that, at worst, he might have to wear a leg-bag. He railed against everything and everyone involved as if it were someone’s fault that he had the cancer that had got him into this situation and that, even if it were not, then it was someone’s fault that he might be left incapacitated after the operation. His life would be ruined. Never would he be able to live a proper life in that situation.

I suddenly realised that I had not one iota of sympathy for the man.

Firstly he might never have the problem. Secondly if he did then the alternative would be likely to be death.  Which would you choose?

Then I though just how many billions of people there are on this earth in a worse situation.

Then I narrowed it down to the millions worse off with conditions like Parkinson’s Disease, Motor Neurone Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, paraplegics, people in constant pain and so on ad infinitem. There are so many people, too, who have inconvenient complications because the NHS and medical science have managed to keep them alive when otherwise they would have died.

Many of those people really do have lives changed far beyond anything they can do to help themselves.

Being wholly or partially bladder incontinent is NOT one of those things. It is an inconvenience to be overcome and overcome it can be. I know because, in 1998, I was left bladder incontinent after my prostate removal.

The surgeon said how sorry he was that I had become a statistical 1 in 20. My response was that, as the alternative to taking the risk had been death, (there was no further treatment for prostate cancer 20 years ago) I was just glad to be alive to have the problem.

I did a lot of training and eventually got rid of the bag. Now I’m not much worse off than millions of ladies who have had children and dread sneezing! No one who met me would ever know the situation.

Returning to the bag on my back, hopefully tomorrow when I have another operation I will wake up with a stent, no kidney stone and no bag on my back.

In the meantime I have walked a mile in another man’s shoes and will have a greater appreciation of what he has experienced.

I will not, though, expect him to tell me how badly life has treated him.

Thankful Thursday: Home

I'm writing this coming up to midnight on Friday 22 April just over 100 hours since I had the new knee. It has been an amazing week and absolutely nothing has turned out as I expected. The operation was, apparently, textbook. I had an epidural and whilst I didn't actually see what was going on I was certainly aware of it. I didn't, of course, feel any pain at all at the time.  I was the first on last Monday so by the time the day had ended I had had a good chance to catch up with things and realise what was what. It wasn't the best of days. However I slept well and by Tuesday lunchtime the angels of mercy had the pain under control and I never looked back. 

I was up and about and on Wednesday the surgeon was so pleased he said I'd be out on Friday. However on Tursday morning he was so pleased with progress he said, if the physiotherapist was happy, I could go that afternoon. He was so I went!

Obviously it's not the end of the journey but the physical recovery so far has been remarkable. My only problem is nausea and a complete lack of desire to eat. I'm sure that will all be sorted soon.

The staff were so kind, caring and thoughtful and my thanks to, and praise of, everyone involved is fulsome and heartfelt. The four of us who were recovering together in the room were together for just a few days but the craic was brilliant as we all discovered the links we shared in the community and, in some cases, reminisced.

I had been convinced when I went in that I would have lots of time in Blogland and writing letters etc. I did virtually none of that. I slept and I exercised. I ate (the food was good) when I could and the rest of the time was taken up by visiting and the like. I was in hospital for 96 hours. Four of the fastest days and nights I've lived. Four days for which I am very thankful indeed.

Six Quick Weeks

It is just over six weeks since I left Scotland. It's been six strange weeks. Very little has gone to plan: Pauline and I didn't have our planned safari and other visits I'd planned for last week were cancelled because I ended up in the Emergency Ward about 10 days ago with an infection and some other odds and ends I won't bore you with. The last week has had its ups and downs but I'm now feeling okay and the doc has pronounced me fit to fly. In a few hours I will leave Napier and by 2100 hours I should be in the air on the way back to Scotland via Dubai and a short stop in Australia. I arrive back in Scotland on Thursday (UK time) and on Lewis on Tuesday the 22nd.

Please don't think I've not had an great time. I have. It's just not been the time I intended. Instead I fell back into my usual life here. It has been good. I've cemented some friendships and, because I've been staying with The Family, my time with them has been wonderful.

I had intended to do almost daily blog posts but, despite masses of material, that just hasn't happened and I seem to have spent very little time in Blogland. Ironically last week when I cancelled travel plans and therefore had more time to blog, the infection and the cure (which of the two was worse I'm not sure) left me nauseous and lethargic.

So you may be getting posts about New Zealand for a while to come.

In the meantime I'll leave you with Max Patte's Solace in the Wind on the Wellington waterfront. Somehow that wasn't the title I had in mind (the significance of 'wind' by the way is, I assume, because Wellington is known as The Windy City).