Day 8 Thursday

I managed to sleep but only until 3am, bummer. I lie there until 5am and then I am sick of it so I sit up and write this. For the first time since 2003 I am able to lie on my left side, normally I can only lie on my back or my right side to sleep. The nurse says she thinks it’s the ketamine that is stopping me from sleeping. It has to be, as sleeping is something I normally do well! I am now going to fill in the time until breakfast reading the newspaper. I have one more day to go, I am nearly there. The aching legs are a real nuisance so at 5.45am I ask for two Panadeine Forte.

That double door (hallucination) is still banging. I read the paper until Nurse Ben from the Philippines comes in at 8am and gives me my tablets. He is very nice with a pleasant, cheery face. I speak to Nick on the phone, Ben says they might start bringing me down tonight which means there is a slim chance of going home tomorrow. My check-out day is meant to be Saturday but I was told if I felt well enough it could be brought forward to Friday. Nick says it will have to be after he finishes work on Friday. That is good for me. Maybe Jenny can bring Pippa to the hospital and we can go home together.

I start hearing people talking and laughing, and they are inside Roger, it’s like he is a radio. How bloody ridiculous, we will be having none of that! I tell Roger “the radio” off and to cut it out, and it works and the noise stops but I don’t have so much luck with the background slamming door but hopefully it will stop soon.

I put on some music and relax and nod off and then Marie arrives, her cousin Magdalena has brought her up. Marie and Magdalena are angry and upset that Roger has now run out of special K and is carrying on at full voice. I rang the buzzer over half an hour ago but they still haven’t changed the syringe over.

I get up and drag the screaming Roger to the bathroom which is flooded from my shower over an hour ago. It’s all the way to the door, it obviously suffers from poorly designed drainage. Marie works as a nursing attendant at a large public hospital and she is horrified that I could fall over so she starts to clean the water up. Magdalena goes and finds a cleaning lady to mop it up. Magdalena is a nurse at a public hospital and neither of them is impressed at how I am being cared for. They both say waiting that long for a drug of dependence is not acceptable and that it would not happen in a public hospital.

Eventually after another half an hour (so an hour in total after it ran out) my syringe is swapped over and we go out to Mr Garden Bench and enjoy the warmth of the sun. It is so wonderful to be outside, I am so lucky that Marie has come to visit me again. I prattle on high as a kite until it is time for them to take me back to my room as they have things to do. 

Marie has been seriously ill since May 2016 - 18 months. How does she do this? She is so strong and positive, such a wonderful role model to people around her. Back on my bed Magdalena sees me reaching in my drawer for my purse and says: do you want a coffee? I ask her how does she know that is what I want? She says she does it all the time in her job. I wouldn’t think to ask a nurse to get me a coffee as they have proper work to do.

Before they leave Magdalena takes a photo of Marie and me holding hands. We have been friends since 1993, 24 years. When she is better, maybe in the spring we are going to go to Tasmania and have a girls' holiday together. They leave and I write this.

                                                                 Marie and me.

I am worried that I am coming across in my writing as a saint but everyone knows I’m not. I am a demanding person with very high standards and I do not tolerate fools but this drug is softening me so only the good parts of me are showing. The other side that rubs people up the wrong way will return in a couple of days and it might return with a vengeance! Khloe will get her bossy mum back and not the sweet mum she’s had for the last few days who will let her hold her hand.

I get up to get a cardigan for my shoulders, (so much for thinking I would be hot in hospital) and I find myself dancing like no one is watching, I’m not moving my feet but I am enjoying myself. Julia and Angus Stone’s music is on Spotify, such sweet, young siblings.

Lunch arrives. I will make myself eat the sandwiches later, I have the fruit and cheese put in the fridge for afternoon tea. They need to throw out yesterday’s fruit and cheese as I didn’t get to eat them. Hopefully I am losing some weight - can you lose two kilos in a week if you stop drinking wine, barely move and barely eat? I get a phone call from an unknown number. I let it go to message bank, Nick will sort it out tonight. That door is still double-bouncing behind me. Can someone please shut it (bloody hallucinations)!

The lovely lunch lady Molly comes in for my tray. I thank her for caring for me the other day when “the administrator” tried to make me move rooms. She said: you remember me? I said: yes you helped me, she said: I am like that I can’t see someone upset. I told her how tonight or tomorrow I was going to be coming down off the ketamine and walking into my new life. When I told her about my accident she got a bit cross with the man that went through the red light but I explained to her we couldn’t be too angry with him as there were no drugs or alcohol involved. The police thought he made a mistake and saw the green arrow and thought it was for him and went straight on. I told Molly I could have made that error and that Khloe and I heard him screaming “what have I done, what have I done?” repeatedly as we crawled out the overturned car window. I also saw his face and he was mortified. We can’t hate him, I think it’s best that he doesn’t know how it has affected my life.

I’ve still got the cough and the banging door but I can manage them. I roll onto my left side, such a strange feeling to lie on my left shoulder. I might even be able to see my family arriving through the window before they knock on the door. I enjoy the luxury of lying on my left side and then my day gets ever better. La Chica arrives and says she will be my nurse until 10pm. 

My auntie and uncle come to visit me and stay for a while. My auntie said later that it was the funniest hospital visit she had ever had as I chatted non-stop about Lucing in the sky with diamonds and tripping the light fantastic. After they left I dozed, read the paper and listened to music for the rest of the afternoon.

At 6pm I turned on the news. Now my arm is starting to hurt where the PICC line goes in. The TV is in the wrong position. It is too high and too far to the left, it hurts my neck and my arm gets worse. I ask for Panadeine Forte and La Chica brings them promptly. She explains that she can stop the ketamine if the pain becomes intolerable. I said I would take the pain-killers and manage.

Nick and Doc Malik arrive. Malik asks me why I am squirming around in bed and I tell him that I am in a lot of pain with my arm and my neck. Malik says he will arrange for an ultrasound of my arm to check for a blood clot. I tell him I have something to show him and I open a drawer that has six small bottles of wine in it. 

Every night I have ordered white wine with dinner and put it in the drawer. I thought it was absurd that a person high as a kite on ketamine should be offered wine. He said the wine was fine, I could have had my wine every night. Unbelievable! He then told me a story about a priest he was treating who went a bit overboard with the wine though and he had to tell him to back off. La Chica brings a plastic water jug full of ice and turns it into a wine cooler and pops a bottle in to cool down.

I take my glass of wine and Nick and I go to visit the charming Mr Garden Bench and chat for a while. All my pain goes away. Moving is always good - staying in one spot always increases the pain and going for a walk generally improves it. It was lovely on the bench.

I start coming down tomorrow, Friday lunchtime and I should go home Saturday at 10am.

10pm Roger runs out of ketamine. Nick goes home and 40 minutes later I am still waiting for my top- up. Apparently the nurse is transferring another patient; I feel the wait is too long, they should have more staff. I finally get topped up and given my night meds. This is when I realise I wasn’t given my extra pills last night, the ones I have to take to make the ketamine work, I think they are magnesium. You really shouldn’t rely on the word of a patient on 40mg of ketamine. I get to sleep and wake just after 1am and I drift in an out of sleep until the sun comes up at 6am and I get up and open the blind.