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 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.
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