Come On Now Camel, It's Only a Straw

I had to press Reset the other day.

I was being sucked into the self-pity vortex. Stephen Fry would have disapproved. 

I was sore. Cranky. Sleep deprived. Beginning to mutter things about pulling the drain out myself if the doctors wouldn't do it. Suggesting I would have taken my own discharge if they hadn't let me out.

I chose to offload this emotional cargo in my surgeon's office. 
Poor man. 
He had been looking forward to showing me the scans which displayed what a great job he had done, and the histology results which showed how little cancer was left. 
He had been anticipating one of those consultations, few and far between in his line of work, where everyone is delighted with everything and we all pat each other on the back. 

But oh no, actual here-and-now emotion had to come along and ruin it. He did try to use the phrase "bigger picture" to stop me snivelling, but he may as well have said "there, there."

{Which, as an aside, brings me to a revelation I had about Pain Specialists. Their job, fundamentally, IS to say "they're there." Yes, those painful sensations you have DO exist. You are experiencing them, therefore they are real. Pain is not a palpable, visible thing, it is a state of being which is hard to quantify and even harder to accurately describe. It is an intensely personal experience, and the worst thing about it is being unable to "prove" its existence to other people. So acknowledgement of its presence, and its impact, is often all that someone needs. 
Anyway, that's my profound thought for the day.}

So I wept and I snotted and I heard words catching in my throat as I tried to describe how hard it had been for me to go back into hospital and leave my family again. 

He listened. He acknowledged. He berated me for not having called him sooner. 
He was so right. The "Don't mind me, I'll be fine" trick really doesn't help anyone, and could have saved him a box of Kleenex. 

I did feel a hell of a lot better after an old inconsolable wail though. Once again, the children have the right idea. Play around, get hurt, bawl your eyes out, shriek the house down, then go back to playing away happily again three minutes later. 

I had made my escape from hospital a few days earlier thanks to the wonderful OPAT service, which meant a nurse was calling out to me three times a day to give me IV antibiotics. She waded her way through dirty washing and discarded Lego and half-eaten Weetabix to hook me up, check my temperature and chat about how great community medicine is. There was something nicely reassuring about having a personal healthcare provider in your own home three times a day. I felt like some kind of 18th century duchess.

I got the sutures removed from my drain site. Oh the bliss, the indescribable bliss, of being able to turn more than two inches to the left or right while lying in bed, without searing pain. They discovered I had fluid on my lung, which had increased significantly since the week before. That would explain the breathlessness then. 

I got home again, and the temperature went up again. Bugger.

But aha, clever me, this time I know what to do! I text the Man in Charge. He phones me back, tells me what to do overnight, arranges for me to get fixed the next day. 
I avoid the Emergency Room, I avoid abandoning my brood, I save more Kleenex. 

I go and see the Antibiotic Man first thing, he sorts me out with some more of those. 
I go to the Can Fix Anything With A Scan And A Needle Man, and he drains off a litre or so of lung fluid (which looks remarkably like the home brew we made once that nearly sent us all blind.) 
I head off home again after a couple of hours. I am beginning to wonder why they bother with hospital beds at all - Outpatient Inpatient Care is the way to go. 
I get a phone call while I'm in the coffee shop to go back for a quick dose of different antibiotic to tide me over until my home delivery arrives the next day. Another 30 minutes, in and out, job done. Two and a half hours. Probably 90% of the patients lying in beds in there had less than that amount of actual medicining done to them in the past 24 hours. And it has cost 90 times more to keep them there. 

Having a needle stuck through your ribcage is a very sore thing. Nobody I said this to seemed the least bit surprised, yet I never once thought about it when I did it to patients myself. But it improved, and I slept, and I rolled over in the bed without waking up. Such a good feeling. 

I tore into life the next day. Grocery shopping, fridge cleaning, laundry sorting, library visiting, dinner making. 

I crawled out of bed the day after. Ooops. May have overstretched myself a wee bit. 




But it felt a damn sight better than feeling sorry for myself.