NHS
I work (for now), I love, I live, I have fun. Just with wheelchairs and drugs and spasms and stuff...
18 April 2020
Yikes! Well that’s been a fun two weeks or so. Not. Lockdown all started out ok. The sun was out and I was set on getting just a bit fitter. This brief video of me exercising is not speeded up. At all. No sir-eee https://youtu.be/lKE6OAxR9HI Then, just as the U.K. was approaching peak cases and hospitals were heroically, desperately bursting at the seams, I developed the main symptoms of Covid-19. A constant, exhausting and painful dry cough. A fever. In my case, a sore throat and a touch of nausea too. And anxiety through the roof. A doctor call-back confirmed I probably had it, as did a dashed paramedic visit to our son, who also had Covid-19, but with an […]
8 May 2017
Urology. The dark arts of investigating malfunctioning bladder and bowels. I doff my cap to anyone who enters or leaves medical studies and says, “I know, I’ll become an expert in wee and poo and stuff.” Sadly, like many a person with Multiple Sclerosis, I’m well-acquainted with urologists and their capacity for rummaging around and describing with complete precision the shape and size of my prostate. All the while chatting to me about the time of day or this afternoon’s weather. And the title of my blog, “One man and his catheters,” may just indicate one routine I have to follow three or four times a day. The first time I did it, the nurse training me, (no, she wasn’t […]
30 April 2017
Tuesday May 1st 2007. It was cloudy and a bit miserable I recall. Perhaps some drizzle. For the previous three or four months I’d been going through a barrage of tests for those clever-ologists to find out what was going on. My brand new neurologist, a bookish little chap with small round glasses, had made me do various eyes-closed tests, touch my nose, touch each finger to each thumb in rapid succession, and some creative variations on walking in a straight line. He had also poked my feet with a pin a few times. I hadn’t realised how numb they were until that point. Still a bit ouchy though. My new urologist, meanwhile (the waterworks specialist), poked me and rummaged […]
10 March 2017
Hurrah! I’m out of hospital after a total of 13 nights fighting a bladder infection and temperatures twice steaming scarily over 41 degrees.. My ward routine that started around 5am with a rude awakening for blood pressure checks and a refreshed IV drip is no more. It’s been replaced these last mornings with a gorgeous 6.30am start, the time my two much-missed children are allowed to start bounding around the house before school. I’m utterly exhausted and I’m blissfully relieved… My last five hospital nights were spent in a ward of four chaps including myself. One stubborn but lovely old gent of 89 also recovering from an infection. A big nose, a big smile and capable of humongous, prolonged noises […]