The Land of Mordor

I was not looking forward to today, it was tending to make me anxious and a tad fretful. Now, I've been through this Lord knows how many times but I just do not enjoy that first visit back to the plaster room to have the stitches removed.

I very nearly passed out last time and this time there are fucking millions of the little bastards...oh alright, there's about forty. My foot looks like it's been worked on by a particularly industrious Igor...gratuitous Terry Pratchett reference.

So I dress in my finest and donning the hat set forth with Helen for the distant Land of Mordor, or to the cognoscenti Southmead Hospital...it might as well be Mordor, they're bloody good at torture and dismemberment.

Of course when we arrive the car park is full so we have to pull in right in front and I hobble into the hospital on crutches whilst Helen finds a wheelchair, I'm left with a very lovely retired lady dressed in pink who then pushes me about three miles to the plaster room. My appointment was at 1030 and we arrived at 1005 so I settled down for a long wait. First things first, neck some morphine, by the time I go in I should be fairly well ensconced in the land of the fairies. No such luck, about 3 minutes later my escort to the land of Mordor comes out and says, 'Well since you're here we might as well get started'
I'm fairly sure at this point I started to babble that I was early and there were probably people in front of me.

I'm taken in and laid out on the slab, sorry, laid out on the table. First thing they do is cut the plaster off with a saw. I kid you not, it's a vibrating saw, I've got one at home for cutting floorboards


Once they get the plaster off which involves a good deal of pulling and tugging and certain amount of ritual swearing you are left with the wound dressing, or in my case the multiple wound dressings. At this point I'm afraid I laid back and didn't look as the dressings did not want to come off. They had to soak them quite a bit before they'd budge.

Now it's down to the actual stitches, and this is the bit that I'm not terribly keen on, however the morphine is kicking in quite satisfactorily and I spend the next half an hour or so discussing the winter olympics with the nurse, in between squealing like a stuck pig whenever a stitch refused to come out.

I am a complete wuss, the actual pain involved is minimal, imagine someone pulling out one of your nose hairs with a pair of tweezers, at it's most painful that's about the limit and most of them only amounted to a gentle tug that I didn't really feel.

It all looks pretty good and seems to be healing OK which is rather marvellous.  Honest, this all looks good to me :-)






  



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