Interim Debrief.

I feel I should say something about my week’s incarceration in the Royal Derby Hospital. It’s difficult to know where to start because it was a big experience, and it seemed even bigger because it was a bad experience.

Stop, Jeffrey. That’s a gross understatement.

Is it? Oh, right. Substitute a string of pejorative adjectives like ‘horrendous’, ‘appalling’, ‘dreadful’, ‘ghastly’, ‘horrific’ and so on?

That’s better.

OK. The simple fact is that I dreaded going in, and contrary to my usual experience of things dreaded, the actual reality was much worse than the imagined. I wasn’t expecting the level of pain, the vomiting, the persistent heartburn for almost the whole week, the persistent nausea which hasn’t quite left me yet, the fact of having my body punctured by a selection of tubes taking things out and putting different things in, the weakness, the inability to think straight for several days, and the being kept awake for much of every night by activity and noise. (The first night set the trend when the man in the next bed broke wind so often and so loudly that it set the record with consummate ease for the most extraordinary expression of flatulence I’ve ever heard or ever want to hear. I wonder whether he might have worked for Cirque du Soleil at some point during their rowdier period. And there’s a story attached to that which I’ll probably include in another post some time.)

But now I’m making light of it, and maybe I shouldn’t. There was very little that was amusing about my week in the Royal Derby Hospital following an elective right sided uretoscopy and laparoscopic radical hepto-ureterectomy. The physical unpleasantness (I’ll stick with the understatement this time) was also only one member of the pantheon of horrors. There were more; there were; really there were. Like the relationship between staff and patients, like the quality of the food, like the chemicals issue, like the way time expanded so that one hour felt like at least five.

So maybe I should leave it there for now; do this in small doses rather like I’m supposed to be taking food. Or how about I mention one of the few things which I did find mildly amusing? OK.

One day I found my record book lying on my bed, so I sneaked a peek. One comment said:

Communicates his needs well to the nursing staff.

Naturally I understood the real statement behind the polite formality of systemic convention:

He whinges a lot and is very good at it.