The Thing in TJ's Brain Part 5: Fully Operational

My apologies for the long gap since my last post. I can assure you that rumours of my death are partially exaggerated. However, the two and a half months since posting have been rather eventful, and I’ve not been in much of a position to be able to write. As it is, I can’t write for very long before I start feeling ill (more on this later), hence the length of time it’s taken to compose this.

Let’s pick up where we last left off. Tomorrow became today, and we got up at an hour usually reserved for milkmen, postmen and members of the criminal classes. I’d been forbidden from eating, but was permitted a bottle of water at precisely six o’clock. It’s difficult downing 500 ml of water in one second, and I did not succeed, but decided not to tell the hospital in case they cancelled my operation again.

We got the train into London, and arrived at our destination without incident. We went into the reception and were directed to a waiting area. More people began to join us, wearing apprehensive expressions. Eventually we were informed that we could head up to the surgical unit, and all piled into a lift.

We ascended, and my wife and I were sent into a waiting room of our own. Here we waited. After a while, a youngish chap came in. “I’m a doctor!” he proclaimed in a loud, cheerful voice that was possibly meant to reassure me. Instead, it made me wonder if he was actually a doctor, or an escaped lunatic who’d stolen a stethoscope.

“Can you feel this?” He poked me in the arm.

“Yes.”

“What about this?” He poked me in the leg.

“Yes?”

“This?” He proceeded to poke me a few more times, then started stroking the sides of my face, my torso and my legs, adding to my growing suspicions.

“Um, yes?”

“Right, stick your tongue out.” I did so. “Now waggle it round.” I began to suspect that this was less an escaped madman than some sort of reality TV prank show or something, and glanced around for the hidden camera. However, I followed the instruction. Apparently satisfied, the man left again, either to stay ahead of hospital security or to go over the footage with his producer.

We continued to wait, and after a bit longer, someone else came in. This was a young woman in a lab coat, who asked if, while the surgeon was sticking things up my nose, I’d mind if they kept a bit of it. Apparently she was a medical researcher involved in a study on the use of nasal nerve cells, entitled ‘The Source, Culture and Characterisation of Human Olfactory Ensheathing Cells Obtained from Biopsies of Nasal Mucosa’. In layman’s terms, as she explained, nasal stem cells.

I immediately consented to take part. Firstly, the surgeon would be up there anyway, so I didn’t see why they couldn’t take a little piece from the inside of my nose, secondly, it sounded like it had the potential to help an awful lot of people, and thirdly, because she was really rather attractive in a geeky sort of way, which is the best sort of way.

I have, however, realised that there was a significant lost opportunity here. Since that day, it has occurred to me that I could have said, whilst signing the consent form, “Well, it’s no skin off my nose!” However, at the time this ingenious bon mot did not occur to me. Alas, the master punster’s life is littered with such lost opportunities, and all one can do is resolve to be more vigilant in the future, and seize on such chances when they present themselves.

Two more couples arrived in our waiting room, looking fairly miserable, and took seats. Shortly after this, a tall, sweaty man in neon cycling gear marched in and announced that he was my anaesthetist. My confidence failed to be inspired. He proceeded to ask me a lot of questions that I’d already answered to various different people. I lied about drinking 500ml of water at exactly six o’clock. Eventually, he got bored of the interrogation and left again.

We continued to wait. The two couples who’d come in, both rather elderly, had started to talk. One of the old men seemed to be complaining about his local council. Apparently they’d recently spent £40 million on new cycle paths, but the old man couldn’t get eye drops. I wasn’t quite certain of the connection, but he seemed very annoyed by it.

My eavesdropping was disturbed by a nurse who came in to take my temperature and blood pressure. She seemed especially impressed by the blood pressure, which I took as a compliment. She also provided me with a hospital gown, paper underpants, surgical stockings and slipper-socks. I reluctantly donned these, and was not impressed by the overall effect. I don’t expect to see them on the catwalks of Milan any time soon. That said, the slipper-socks were bright red and I was really rather fond of them.

By the time I’d finished changing, the old man had moved on to complaining about his son. Apparently this deviant delinquent breakfasts at Gordon Ramsay’s, but doesn’t own a hedge trimmer!

The nurse returned, and gave me a wristband with my name on, in case I forgot it. I was also tagged like a criminal, with a tracking device around my wrist, so that they could track me if I sneaked off to the restaurant.

It was then announced that the time had come, and two nurses escorted me through the corridors. We arrived in an extremely cold room, where I once again encountered the sweaty cyclist, now more reassuringly dressed in medical scrubs. I was once again asked all the same questions, and once again lied about drinking my water at precisely six o’clock.

I was asked to lie down on a bed, and lay there trying not to shiver. Not only are hospital gowns not very appealing, they’re also not very thermal. Happily, one of the people offered me a blanket, which I accepted gratefully. They stabbed a canula into my arm, which they used to start injecting me with things. They also provided me with a face mask thing and told me to breathe deeply. Having never been anaesthetised before, I observed all this with great interest. They injected two or three different liquids into my arm via the canula The sensation of cold liquid being injected into your vein is very odd. In fact, it started to become extremely uncomfortable, even painful.

However, I continued to breathe from the mask. I began to feel light-headed, and lay back, closing my eyes to try and help things along.

“Tom? Tom?” I woke up with a jerk and a grunt to find a nurse standing over me.

“Are you okay?”

I considered this for a moment, but was too tired to say anything, so I simply nodded.

“Do you know where you are?” I thought about this, and nodded again.

My recollection of events is a little confused at this point. I remember my wife being there when I woke up, but she assures me that I was already awake and in the high dependency unit when she was called through.

As my mentis became increasingly compos, I began to realise a few things. I now had long strands of gauze coming out of each nostril, and taped securely to my face, there was a pipe coming out of my spine, they’d fitted a urinary catheter, but worst of all, someone had stolen my bright red slipper-socks! My feeling of betrayal was palpable.

I was also feeling rather sick, probably due to the anaesthetic. On top of this, my mouth was incredibly dry. My tongue, when I poked it in a spirit of scientific enquiry, felt like old leather, and when I tried swallowing, the sides of my throat stuck together rather uncomfortably. I had a jug of water by my bedside, but even this didn’t help much. I’d have a drink, which was immediately absorbed by the inside of my mouth. I’d drink a bit more, enough to damp my throat, and I’d be more comfortable for a bit, but within minutes, the Sahara-like dryness would return. This went on for a couple of days, after which my mouth regained its former moistness.

The nurses on the high dependency unit, where I stayed for a couple of days, were very nice, but had a nasty habit of asking the same questions over and over again. “What’s your name? What’s your date of birth? Where are you?” Even once you’ve demonstrated your knowledge of these tricky brain-teasers, they continue to ask, in case they can catch you out.

The bed next to mine contained an elderly gentleman, who was being subjected to this interrogation. “Do you know where you are?” He mumbled something more or less incoherent. “Ok,” the nurse tried again in an unusual fit of generosity, “do you know what kind of building you’re in?”

He thought about this for a moment. “Victorian, I think isn’t it?” This answer immediately made him my hero.

I was removed to a regular ward to recover, and here I stayed for about five days. I will mention at this point the food. Hospital food generally has a bad reputation, but overall I found it reasonably good. Some dishes were better than others, but most were at least edible. In the morning, along with breakfast, we’d be given a menu to choose what we wanted for lunch and dinner. This included a large array of different options, both hot and cold, and one of the possible meals was an ‘All Day Breakfast’. This intrigued me, and I asked about it when the Food Lady (I assume that this was her title) came back round.

“Excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“I have a question about the All Day Breakfast in the menu.”

“Yes?”

“Well, we don’t get the menus until after breakfast.”

“That’s right.”

“I suppose my question is: Is the ‘All Day Breakfast’ available for breakfast?”

“No, sorry. Just lunch and dinner.”

“Just lunch and dinner?”

“Yes.”

“The ‘All Day Breakfast’?”

“That’s right.”

“I see.” I didn’t push it further, since she was just doing her job and was a nice enough lady really.

Time passed, and eventually they decided to remove my lumbar drain, the pipe sticking out of my spine. This was fairly painful, but by no means agonising. They also pulled the gauze out of my nose. This wasn’t painful, but was deeply unpleasant. The doctor just kept spooling it out, like a handkerchief from a magician’s sleeve. The next day, they decided to remove my catheter. I won’t go into unnecessary detail here. All I can say is that it was extremely unpleasant, and if any of my readers were thinking of getting one I cannot recommend it. Zero stars out of however many stars you want. It doesn’t matter which astronomical scale you’re using. It gets zero.

Worse was that I had previously overheard a fellow inmate who’d had one of these, and who was suffering from urinary retention, so he had to have his put back in. Having one removed was bad enough. The thought of it going the other way was absolutely terrifying. The first time I went to the toilet after it was removed was one of the greatest reliefs of my life, in more than one sense of the term.

I must now, and with great regret, report that I failed to complete the To Do List from my last post. I told the surgeon that he got up my nose, and actually managed to use the ‘Lumbar Jack’ one several times on different nurses, with varying degrees of success. The rest, I am sad to say, went unused.

I was eventually judged fit to return to civilised, law-abiding society, given my parole and released back into the wild. As a parting gift, they presented me with a bag containing various drugs and medicines. What they did not present me with was a means of getting home. As it was, and still feeling very ill, we got a taxi back to the station, and from there a very busy train. I was still feeling rather feeble, dizzy and nauseous, and this journey was hellish from start to finish. The train driver, aware that I was on board and holding a severe grudge against me for reasons unknown, deliberately chose the bumpiest possible route to ensure that his or her section of the journey was as bad as they could make it. Despite their best efforts I survived the journey. A friend met us at the station, and drove us home, rendering the last portion of the trip as minimally hellish as possible.

I got home and collapsed onto the sofa to begin my convalescence away from interrogative nurses and breakfasts that you can only have in the afternoon. However, it seemed that the NHS had not heard the last of me, as I will relate in my next post.