A Memoir - 12 Long Days

This is the piece I've been wrestling with!

It was not on my to do list, to spend 12 long days in hospital right at the beginning of the year. Nonetheless, that is what happened, following on from emergency surgery to my bowel and one scary conversation with a stressed anaesthetist who had deep concerns about the drugs they were going to have to try on me. She advised me to call my family, hospital code for ‘you might not wake up’. I did not call my family, I was in too much pain, utterly exhausted, and in shock by that point.

I did in fact wake up just over 8 hours later, if you can call that discombobulating experience post general anaesthetic ‘awake’, when all you’re really aware of is light, blurry coloured shapes and voices asking you for your name and date of birth. I was asked this so much in the next 12 days I began to wish I had the information tattooed somewhere so I could just point.

Gradually I became more aware of my surroundings, I had a nasal-gastric (NG) tube protruding from my nose and three other tubes emerging from my abdomen. I had been very grumpy with the nurses who had interrupted my sleep overnight every 15mins to do observations, but it gradually dawned on me that I was indeed still alive despite the anaesthetist’s anxiety.

An image of me, wearing an oxygen mask as well as the NG tube, post-operation. It’s rather blurry because it’s a screenshot from my friend’s phone.

I was moved from the surgical recovery ward on to the gastric ward for further recovery fairly quickly and there I met my fellow patients.

Is there another space which throws together such a hotchpotch of characters at their most vulnerable and weak?

I’ve had several stays in hospital in the past 14 years, for a variety of reasons and have discovered that each one has left me with scars, some external but also many internal. The flashback struck me early on this time, as I was being wheeled into the bay, I could hear shouting from another patient. Everything in me tensed. I recognised the timbre of the shouts; I had previous experience of being on a ward with dementia patients and it was hard. Hard on the staff, and hard on the other patients. This time I was relieved to realise that the shouty patient did not have dementia, and was well looked after by the staff.

There were other differences to this stay: the staff were all kind and seemed to work very well in their teams, the lights were too bright, the bed was so uncomfortable, my hospital gown was scratchy, my throat (where the NG tube went from my nose into my stomach) felt like glass and I had a lot more interaction with my fellow ward-mates.

There were three other patients I especially remember. One who had been very ill as I arrived on the ward. This patient spent the next 24 hours asleep, snoring, grunting and thrashing about in the bed. My mind created an image of a wild, many tentacled entity with long dishevelled hair creating a nest behind the curtain by the window. In reality, Elaine* was a perfectly normal looking 80-something year old woman who, admittedly, had the loudest snore I had ever heard.

Another was Daphne, the only other patient in the whole ward who was under 70. She also had an NG tube, although her condition was very different and indeed more complicated than mine. Daphne had a big family, 2 boys and 3 girls, all grown up with their own children. I knew this because she was regularly on the phone to them, on speaker phone.

And then there was Caroline, the longest-standing patient on the ward, and a lovely generous, kind woman. On the day that my NG tube came out, she went and bought a cold drink from the shop for me because my throat was so sore. She was a wonderful ward-mate.

The staff teams on the ward were wonderfully supportive and friendly. They seemed to work very well together, which, believe me, makes a huge difference to the overall experience. I couldn’t move well enough to wash for the first couple of days, but on day 3 the two HCAs working on my ward appeared at my bedside with a bowl of water and several towels. They helped me wash myself including my hair. What a difference it makes to be clean!

Another of the HCAs procured me a fan after I mentioned how hot I was, in the bed that was furthest away from the window.

I remember asking the medicines team whether I should be taking any of my regular medications while in hospital. I had been taking meds for my blood pressure, blood thinners and a couple of different painkillers. I spoke to same nurse twice about this, both times she said she would double check and come back to me. Both times she reassured me that her supervisor had confirmed I didn’t need to take these whilst in hospital. I thought this was odd but reassured that she had checked I didn’t ask again.

There was one more big difference to this stay: I. Could. Not. Sleep. This was a problem from my first night on the ward, and it was another 5 nights before I slept for anything more than a few minutes at a time, by which time my temperature was spiking again and, although they had been on the verge of sending me home, I was told I needed to stay until my temperature came down. Several things happened as a result: I was given antibiotics intravenously, I had my bloods taken at least once a day and sometimes more, and it became clear that my body was not happy.

That evening, I had to have my cannula changed in order to be given new meds. I have never had cooperative veins, so changing the cannula was no mean feat. The new antibiotic was Clarithromycin, via the new cannula on the inside of my left elbow, and within a few hours I could tell something was wrong, I was in agony. The follwoing morning, the day shift nurse who attended my call tried to calm me down, and persuaded me to keep the cannula in until the antibiotics had finished. This turned out to be the wrong thing to do as I ended up with an extravasation: when the cannula fails and the medicine goes into the soft tissue instead of into the blood stream. My left arm was swollen and excruciatingly painful for the rest of my stay and I was only able to use it normally after I got home.

I did have one vein that was easy to get a needle into, and promptly had the cannula transferred again to that vein on my right inside elbow, posing a problem for anyone else wanting to take my blood and there were A LOT of them.

A Phlebotomist arrived at my bedside every morning, and my body became more and more reluctant to give its life force away. Once or twice they got just about enough blood from the veins in my hands, but even that seemed to dry up.

I had a specialist phlebotomist come to see me – the team who get blood from even the most recalcitrant of bodies – she threatened me with a cannula in my foot, as if I could react by allowing my blood to flow close enough to the surface again.

I think it was day 9 when a junior doctor turned up at my bedside, he was lovely and calm and looked about 20 years of age. I think he was probably given the job of getting blood out of me because he needed the practice. After 5 minutes of plumping a vein in my wrist, he got up to get a needle. Now, I’m no specialist but even I know that you don’t prepare a vein if you haven’t got a needle ready to go. Bless him. He left emptyhanded but reassured me that someone else would be along that day. And they were, a surgical specialist this time. She was also lovely, calm, and a lot more efficient! She was there as a favour to the previous junior doctor, who could only watch in quiet admiration as she got a needle in and blood out swiftly and relatively painlessly. She was the last one to get any of the red stuff from me.

The following morning a phlebotomist came back, she couldn’t find a vein though she tried at least twice, and by this point I was really struggling with how painful it was. That afternoon another pair of doctors, one male and the other female, appeared, drawing the curtains around them as they walked into my bay. The male doctor told me they were going to try getting blood from my femoral line. He explained that it shouldn’t be too painful and that his female colleague was there for supervision.

The minute the needle went into my femoral line I bucked on the bed in pain, trying hard not to scream, tears streamed down my face, as I begged them to stop. It felt like someone was trying to viciously extract the nerve itself. They did stop, and retreated, rather bewildered by my reaction. And to be honest, so was I. I have a high pain threshold in general but I had not felt pain like that ever before. It took a long time to calm down, the HCAs on duty were fabulous, but I was on day 10 of my stay and thoroughly fed up. I had not seen any of my family or friends, except by video or phone call, for 10 days (there were still Covid restrictions in hospitals at the time) and I had not slept for a full night in all that time either.

Sometime later yet another doctor materialised. I looked at the clock and it read 7pm, it was so unusual to see a doctor at this point in the day I wondered what she was there for. She tried to reassure me that she would have success where others failed, despite the plasters and the bruises to match indicating the places others had tried. My left arm was still swollen and unusable in any way (though at least one phlebotomist had tried to get blood from my left hand in the previous day or so), I had a cannula in my right elbow, and bruises on both hands and wrists. I sat as still as I could, tears streaming down my face as she made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to get into a vein. Eventually she gave up, took my sore hand in hers and said in a soothing tone,

‘At least I know you’re not lying about being distressed by this’.

I refused any more attempts to take blood.

On day 12 it was decided that, as my temperature had been normal for long enough, I could go home. What a relief that was.

In the weeks that followed I reflected on this hospital stay: the staff on the ward had been wonderful, I had survived emergency surgery and once I was at home I felt a lot less irritated by all the little things that had been so aggravating in hospital. So why had I felt so bothered by all these things? Why had I not been able to sleep at all for the first week? It was as if my senses had all been high alert, like all my nerves had become exposed in some weird way.

I began to put the pieces together: while in hospital I had not taken any of the tablets that I had been taking regularly before. Only a few weeks before the surgery I’d asked my GP about decreasing my nerve blocking medication, and she’d agreed but warned me it would be a slow process, likely to be painful and difficult. What could happen if someone went off this medication suddenly rather than gradually?

I looked it up.

Insomnia – tick. Irritability – tick. Agitation – tick. Mood swings (including intrusive thoughts) – tick.

All the sleeplessness, all those strange symptoms of being irritated by bright lights and loud music, all the strange thoughts that occurred to me in the small hours of the morning, all the extra difficulties with having bloods taken had ALL been down to going cold turkey from Pregabalin. Not one of the medical or support staff clocked it, despite my questions. It had not crossed my mind either, despite the various discomforts.

It’s important to reiterate that the ward staff were so lovely and reassuring, that I knew a lot of their names at the time but have chosen not to write them down. The procession of doctors who came to take my blood I have not named because not many of them introduced themselves in the first place.

I got a good response from the hospital complaints team that I contacted after realising what had happened.

It was 12 long days and nights, with some really good stuff and some really not good stuff happening to me and around me. I just hope that with the next hospital stay, the ward staff are just as wonderful and my body is not in full withdrawal!

*The names I have used have been changed for privacy reasons.