Day 12 - The daily routine

Sunday 20th September 2009

I didn’t know if the myth was true about eating cheese at bedtime giving you nightmares, but I had a really strange dream during the night. I couldn’t remember much about it but I woke up disorientated then clambered to the end of the bed and ended up half way up the wall. Most odd!!!

My left hip was really hurting today. Up until now it had never given me any pain so I wasn’t happy that I had yet another part of my body was causing me agony.

Sitting on the chair was now aggravating my hip and knee so I had to ask for a foot rest. It did ease things a little but not by much. The chair was the only place I could get comfortable, the only place where I could get any sleep, and now sitting in it hurt. No more sleep for me from now on…

The daily routine in hospital was also starting to get me down. Nothing changed. Everyday was the same:

We were woken at 6am. The beds were then changed or made so there was no chance of even the slightest lie in. Breakfast was at 8am then we had to be washed. All this would be over by 8.45am. A cup of tea or coffee would be given out at 9.45am, and lunch was at 12noon. Afternoon tea or coffee came at 2pm, dinner was at 5pm and the final drink of the day was at 7pm.

Visiting times were 2pm till 5pm and 6pm until 8pm, and once the visitors had gone in the evening, the ward then shut down for the night. By 9pm most of the patients were in bed asleep.

I also hated the daily, and sometimes twice daily, changing of my dressing. My ‘pressure sore’ kept oozing black gung out at a considerable rate so my dressings used to leak all the time. The back of my left leg is extremely sensitive so removing the dressings were extremely painful. Thankfully the nurses seemed to understand – it probably had something to do with me crying out in agony when they pulled the dressing off – so tried to be extra careful.

I spent most of my time sitting, or sleeping, on a pad because of the leaking dressing. This made wearing clothes difficult. I did wear a skirt for a couple of days but the dressings kept leaking through onto the fabric, and the black gung was really difficult to remove (so I was told by John and my mam). In the end I just wore long t-shirts and put a blanket round my legs if they got cold.

Had yet more blood taken from me. It seemed to be a twice daily occurrence. Because my veins are so small and thin it took most of the nurses at least two attempts to get any blood out. If only they didn’t hurt so much when they did it. Where the phrase ‘just a scratch’ came from, I had no idea. It wasn’t a scratch, it was more like a stab !!!

One of the blood samples they took that morning indicated that my potassium levels were low so I had yet more tablets to take. Unfortunately they couldn’t be swallowed whole, they had to be dissolved in water.

I watched as Lesley, one of the staff nurses, put two of the tablets into a glass, poured water over them then took the bottle of lemon squash from my table.
“They taste awful”, she said, “so we always put them in juice”.

She was right. They were horrendous, and that was even with the lemon squash !!!!