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.

Names

As a result of a comment by Helen on my last post I decided to name my recalcitrant  and unmoving kidney stone. The name I gave it was Cal. I thought it was quite a clever name and that I could get a blog post out of it. Helen immediately noticed the most obvious link for an Isle of Lewis kidney stone: Cal as in Callanish Stones. Fortunately it's only 5mm and not 5 metres. However there was also another thing in my mind. What is a common ingredient of kidney stones? Calcium. In addition Cal as a male name means 'devotion'. Given how difficult it is proving to get rid of the little chap I'm convinced that he's become devoted to me.

Fi suggeated Calculi. I didn't realise that urinary calculi are solid particles in the urinary system. Fiona is a vet so she saw a genuine meaning that I missed.

The Callanish Stones, Isle of Lewis

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.