hospital fun
Aug. 6th, 2005 02:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baratronAm home now. Feeling very tired - strangely, you don't actually get much sleep in hospital. For the first 2 nights I was on IV antibiotics, which were supposed to be administered at 10pm exactly - except that didn't happen because of various random emergencies (afaik, none of them on the "someone is about to die" scale, more like what The Sims calls "accidents"). On both nights, the drip got put in around 11.30pm "for 20 minutes", but then didn't get taken out again until quite a lot past midnight. It was pointless trying to go to sleep when I knew I was going to get awakened in a painful way. Me being me, every time they attached or disattached an IV thing, I'd bleed. Only one particular nurse managed to do it without blood loss - I'm not sure what her technique was because I'm far too squeamish to watch, although I suppose it would've been useful to know what she did differently. To be honest, I'm fairly amazed I managed to survive having a needle stuck in my hand for days on end - it says a lot about how much pain I was in that I could.
The worst thing is that for some reason, the veins in my left arm are really buried - even phlebotomists (people whose job it is to take blood for blood tests & that's all they do) have difficulty locating them, whereas my right arm has a huge vein near the surface that's easy to get to. So, because of my need to get the needles away from me asa bloody p (pun not intended), I always tell them to use my right arm, because that takes 20 seconds compared to 5 minutes in my left. However, this means I get a useless bruised dominant arm - and I'm very right handed, about the only thing I do naturally with my left hand is hold my walking stick or hold the phone. Some things, like eating with my left hand alone, are just slow; other actions, like brushing my hair, I can't even work out the motions to co-ordinate. Ugh.
Having kept us up excessively late because of the need to administer drugs, THEN they decided to wake us up at 6am every day to give us some more. For some reason which I really don't understand, the NHS doesn't let you wake up at 6am, take tablets, roll over and go back to sleep - it is waking up for THE DAY, with noisy people coming in and clattering around and offering us hot drinks, and then ignoring you for a couple of hours until the doctors round at 8.30am. Some people more fortunate than I were able to be woken up, take their tablets and then go back to sleep despite the noise, but I'm one of these people that finds it almost impossible to go back to sleep after I've been woken up and severely prodded.
Losing ability to be coherent now, will write more later (tomorrow, prolly).
The worst thing is that for some reason, the veins in my left arm are really buried - even phlebotomists (people whose job it is to take blood for blood tests & that's all they do) have difficulty locating them, whereas my right arm has a huge vein near the surface that's easy to get to. So, because of my need to get the needles away from me asa bloody p (pun not intended), I always tell them to use my right arm, because that takes 20 seconds compared to 5 minutes in my left. However, this means I get a useless bruised dominant arm - and I'm very right handed, about the only thing I do naturally with my left hand is hold my walking stick or hold the phone. Some things, like eating with my left hand alone, are just slow; other actions, like brushing my hair, I can't even work out the motions to co-ordinate. Ugh.
Having kept us up excessively late because of the need to administer drugs, THEN they decided to wake us up at 6am every day to give us some more. For some reason which I really don't understand, the NHS doesn't let you wake up at 6am, take tablets, roll over and go back to sleep - it is waking up for THE DAY, with noisy people coming in and clattering around and offering us hot drinks, and then ignoring you for a couple of hours until the doctors round at 8.30am. Some people more fortunate than I were able to be woken up, take their tablets and then go back to sleep despite the noise, but I'm one of these people that finds it almost impossible to go back to sleep after I've been woken up and severely prodded.
Losing ability to be coherent now, will write more later (tomorrow, prolly).
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-06 02:47 pm (UTC)I'm glad you're home again.
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Date: 2005-08-06 03:22 pm (UTC)Most of our creatures don't really pay much attention to chronological age, though. Paploo is an ewok from when Return of the Jedi came out, so technically he's 22, but it's obvious to anyone who's met him that he's a naughty little wokling rather than an adult ewok (we think he's about 3). Some of our critters have aged since we've had them, but some have aged more quickly than human years while others have aged more slowly. dino has only lived with us for a couple of years, but he's not a baby dino any more even though he's still very small. Yowie is quite wise & venerable, despite not being very old.
And the people who don't care about soft toys promptly write us off as being completely mad, but never mind eh? (Interestingly, I've realised that one of my criteria for partner selection is that the other person must understand that our cuddly toy friends are alive & part of the family - I can't imagine being with someone who'd look at me funny if one of the ewoks or wolfies came in to talk to them).
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Date: 2005-08-06 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-07 01:01 am (UTC)Glad you are out of hospital, sleep is always a good thing to get when home. Kim kept getting woken by noisy cleaners, clattery auxilliary nurses offering tea every 5 mins and general people in the room being confused at her. She was very glad to get home as soon as possible to her own clean quiet bedroom where no one offered her "fucking tea"...
I take it you'll have to have surgery in the future? I hope whatever happens that you don't get flare ups again cos they suck.
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Date: 2005-08-09 09:02 am (UTC)