Lying in Bed - Adventures in Brain Abnormalities
We lie in untidy rows, my bed is a small pool of light in a dark ward. Nobody is dying, currently, but the hiss of ventilators and the hum of automatic blood pressure monitors are witness to the fact that this may be temporary. It’s nearly tomorrow, the day is being chased inexorably into morning. Thirty five minutes to midnight and the breathing of my elderly, restless, brain burned companions is slowing in nightly rhythm. There is no sign of my own incipient cerebral time bomb.
An overweight efficient doctor is writing up her notes in another pool of light around the nurse’s station. A spiky haired nurse that I’ve not seen before stands in silent study of the notes before disappearing behind the tent of curtains surrounding a frightened white-haired grandfather in the next ward. Nobody is dying currently, but he is hovering between this life and the next, his lungs gradually filling with unwanted fluid.
A large and friendly Jamaican nurse arrives at my bedside to extract some blood, we both watch as the blood sugar monitor does its work. 7.6, not bad, the refusal of the Ovaltine an hour or so before has done the trick. But the days of the bedtime milky coffee are definitely over.
I arrived in the ward that afternoon, shunted up from the Bristol Royal Infirmary when they couldn’t work out why my dysfunctional brain kept switching off the right side of my body which was, to say the least, inconvenient. I was greeted by an extremely grumpy ward sister who lost her temper with my call alarm because it kept going off. Eventually she stamped over and shut it off permanently with a roll of surgical tape.
I’m trying to think of something funny to write on Facebook. From the beds opposite the sleeping bodies of old men are conducting an impromptu frog chorus of flatulence with an amazing tonal range. Symphony in E minor for the arse trumpet.
Quietly I hear the doctor calling family, “We’ll call you if there’s any change, we’re moving him to HDU.” Calm, professional compassion fills her voice, remaining detached from the family tragedy that is playing itself out as a regular part of her working day.
As the maybe dying man is moved, another man upon a bed arrives. He is parked with rough efficiency at the end of my bed. I can hear his anxious voice querying the spiky haired nurse about his heart arrhythmia. His voice is hushed but violent with panic and I am in complete sympathy, it’s no fun when your own body suddenly decides it doesn’t like you. A porter appears and the man is wheeled off to who knows where.
Then quiet descends upon the ward as the overweight doctor picks up her notes and leaves in the wake of porter, bed and its querulous inhabitant. I am left in a somehow disturbing silence still punctuated by the beeping and hissing of the eternal blood pressure monitors autonomously checking on their charges. Its twenty minutes past midnight and tomorrow has become today.
I should be asleep but sleep doesn’t come, there is no whirl, no descent into paralysis but I am sure I can feel the blood in the damaged vessels of my brain. I am listening for an unheard voice, I can hear a stutter step, an old man’s relentless shuffle, it’s behind me, it’s at my shoulder, I feel it’s breath upon my cheek, I run and run and run but when I stop, the shuffle, the stutter steps are there. It doesn’t stop, I can hear an undertone, an old worn softness, and with the systolic thump of my own heart here it is.
I realise that my right thumb is no longer working, I grab the call alarm but of course it doesn’t work and now it’s far too late. The paralysis extends over my right side. I can feel my heart rate going through the roof. I can’t move my arm or my leg and the paralysis spreads to my face. It’ll be all right, they always pass after a couple of minutes, but this time it doesn’t. The night nurse is at the end of my bed, a motherly black lady with a greying afro. I try to call but the paralysis has spread too far and my mouth isn’t working. I mutely stare at her willing her to look up but she walks on to the next bed.
I’m unable to move, unable to call anyone and this time I really think that this might be it and I’m going to shuffle awkwardly off this mortal coil. My heart is thumping so loudly that I’m surprised that the nurse can’t hear it. She walks back to the nurse’s station at the other end of the ward, I’m going to die, I know I’m going to die, and just then the feeling begins to return to my hand and it’s all over. I still can’t call the nurse as she’s right at the other end of the ward and I’m far too British to shout and wake everyone up.
I’m lying in bed, still paralysed, but only with fear now, just as I make up my mind that I ought to get up and go and find the nurse it all starts up again, the hand goes numb, the arm stops working and then the face and then fuck me, if the nurse doesn’t appear out of nowhere just when I can’t make her aware of what is going on. I really am going to die now, but I don’t, no I just lie in bed in very British silence whilst I have one mini stroke after another, every fifteen minutes until I fall asleep around 4 in the morning from utter exhaustion.
About 5 minutes later I’m woken by the motherly nurse, taking my blood pressure, sticking a needle in my hand for blood sugar and taking my temperature, which of course were all absolutely normal.
‘Did you have a good night?’
‘Not really, I spent most of the night paralysed down one side thinking I was about to drop off my twig.’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
I mutely gestured to the call alarm beneath its swaddling of surgical tape, I swear she went white and gasped ‘Why didn’t you shout?’
I looked at her, ‘Couldn’t, I was paralysed. Believe me, I tried but by the time it wore off you were at the other end of the ward.’
She looked at me as if I was mentally deficient, ‘So why didn’t you call once it wore off?’
‘I didn’t like to, everyone was asleep’ I said sheepishly, ‘and I didn’t want to get up in case it happened again’
‘Next time’ she scolded me ‘you bloody well shout as loud as you can, I’ll get that alarm looked at as soon as the day shift arrives.’
‘Am I alright to go and have a shower?’, I’d spent the night drenched in sweat and from experience knew that once everyone woke up there would be a queue for the showers.
“Just wait until the day shift arrives so they know where you are”.
As she says this the day shift duly arrives and she says, “Off you go then, I’ll tell them where you are”
I grab the washing kit, towel and clean clothes and head toward the showers. As I pass the nurses station a dumpy nurse looks up and says brusquely. “Don’t lock the door, you may have another seizure”
“Cheers then” I think as I set off down the ward, “Nothing like a little bit of reassurance”
The shower room is fairly large and I can’t work out how the tap works, it’s one of those single ones that change both the temperature and the flow in different directions.
I finally manage to figure out how it works and have industriously covered myself in soap when there is a knock at the door and a nurse’s voice says “Can I come in?” I can’t really hear her over the water so I turn off the tap but it turns the wrong way and all I manage to do is exponentially increase the flow and switch it to freezing cold.
“Fuck” I squeak, leaping out of the stream of glacial water. I can’t see a fucking thing and I can’t hear her over the thundering Niagara that I have precipitated. I brave the water and manage to turn off the tap and call “Just a minute”, wondering what I’ve done to deserve this.
Bizarrely she replies “I want to ask you about your menu”.
I’ve got soap in my eyes, I’m stark bollock naked and about to be joined by a 5’ 4” middle aged slightly grumpy nurse who wants to talk to me about menu preferences. My very erudite reply to her query was “Er” to which she replies “Never mind I’ll ask you later” and disappears out of my life.
I finish my shower in double quick time before anyone else decides to join me and have a naked discussion about menus or the state of the budget.
I climb back into bed and watch the waking ward with interest, the last three weeks have turned me into an avid people watcher.
My experiences of the night before have triggered a veritable avalanche of doctors, nurses and assorted medical practitioners frothing at the mouth and all wanting to stick pins in me for no apparent reason.
“Can you feel this?”
“Ouch”, I nearly leap off the bed as yet another needle is jabbed into my sorely abused flesh. This goes on for most of the morning, “Squeeze my fingers”, “Follow my hand with your eyes”, “Lift your leg, lift your other leg”, “Touch the tip of each finger with your thumb”
I am becoming positively Pavlovian, whenever a member of the medical profession approaches my bed I flinch automatically and by the end I can perform the whole barrage of neurological tests without being asked.
I’m just settling down when the dreaded phlebotomist arrives with her tray of torture implements.
“I need to take some blood, would that be OK”, she smiles brightly.
Now what I really want to do is to tell her “No, that won’t be OK, my arm looks like I’ve been mainlining heroin and you’ve already got at least three pints of the stuff why do you need more”
However being British all I manage is a pathetic ‘Of course’.
The pain caused by the taking of blood is in inverse proportion to the age of the practitioner and this one is young, very young, I would estimate that she is roughly thirteen years old.
As she whips the tourniquet around my arm I desperately try to make conversation.
“Have you been doing this long?”
“No, it’s my first week, you’re only my third patient. I’m still training.”
“Oh” I croak, “and how is it going?”
“Really well, I love it”, she taps the vein in my arm in a very professional manner, “I know it seems odd but I’ve always been interested in blood”
Oh great, I’m about to be operated on by a work experience vampire. As it turns out, she is really good at her job and I hardly feel a thing as she slips in the needle.
This however does not stop about a metric ton of adrenaline being dumped without as much as a ‘by your leave’ into my system. Fucking needles, I hate them.
...to be continued
An overweight efficient doctor is writing up her notes in another pool of light around the nurse’s station. A spiky haired nurse that I’ve not seen before stands in silent study of the notes before disappearing behind the tent of curtains surrounding a frightened white-haired grandfather in the next ward. Nobody is dying currently, but he is hovering between this life and the next, his lungs gradually filling with unwanted fluid.
A large and friendly Jamaican nurse arrives at my bedside to extract some blood, we both watch as the blood sugar monitor does its work. 7.6, not bad, the refusal of the Ovaltine an hour or so before has done the trick. But the days of the bedtime milky coffee are definitely over.
I arrived in the ward that afternoon, shunted up from the Bristol Royal Infirmary when they couldn’t work out why my dysfunctional brain kept switching off the right side of my body which was, to say the least, inconvenient. I was greeted by an extremely grumpy ward sister who lost her temper with my call alarm because it kept going off. Eventually she stamped over and shut it off permanently with a roll of surgical tape.
I’m trying to think of something funny to write on Facebook. From the beds opposite the sleeping bodies of old men are conducting an impromptu frog chorus of flatulence with an amazing tonal range. Symphony in E minor for the arse trumpet.
Quietly I hear the doctor calling family, “We’ll call you if there’s any change, we’re moving him to HDU.” Calm, professional compassion fills her voice, remaining detached from the family tragedy that is playing itself out as a regular part of her working day.
As the maybe dying man is moved, another man upon a bed arrives. He is parked with rough efficiency at the end of my bed. I can hear his anxious voice querying the spiky haired nurse about his heart arrhythmia. His voice is hushed but violent with panic and I am in complete sympathy, it’s no fun when your own body suddenly decides it doesn’t like you. A porter appears and the man is wheeled off to who knows where.
Then quiet descends upon the ward as the overweight doctor picks up her notes and leaves in the wake of porter, bed and its querulous inhabitant. I am left in a somehow disturbing silence still punctuated by the beeping and hissing of the eternal blood pressure monitors autonomously checking on their charges. Its twenty minutes past midnight and tomorrow has become today.
I should be asleep but sleep doesn’t come, there is no whirl, no descent into paralysis but I am sure I can feel the blood in the damaged vessels of my brain. I am listening for an unheard voice, I can hear a stutter step, an old man’s relentless shuffle, it’s behind me, it’s at my shoulder, I feel it’s breath upon my cheek, I run and run and run but when I stop, the shuffle, the stutter steps are there. It doesn’t stop, I can hear an undertone, an old worn softness, and with the systolic thump of my own heart here it is.
I realise that my right thumb is no longer working, I grab the call alarm but of course it doesn’t work and now it’s far too late. The paralysis extends over my right side. I can feel my heart rate going through the roof. I can’t move my arm or my leg and the paralysis spreads to my face. It’ll be all right, they always pass after a couple of minutes, but this time it doesn’t. The night nurse is at the end of my bed, a motherly black lady with a greying afro. I try to call but the paralysis has spread too far and my mouth isn’t working. I mutely stare at her willing her to look up but she walks on to the next bed.
I’m unable to move, unable to call anyone and this time I really think that this might be it and I’m going to shuffle awkwardly off this mortal coil. My heart is thumping so loudly that I’m surprised that the nurse can’t hear it. She walks back to the nurse’s station at the other end of the ward, I’m going to die, I know I’m going to die, and just then the feeling begins to return to my hand and it’s all over. I still can’t call the nurse as she’s right at the other end of the ward and I’m far too British to shout and wake everyone up.
I’m lying in bed, still paralysed, but only with fear now, just as I make up my mind that I ought to get up and go and find the nurse it all starts up again, the hand goes numb, the arm stops working and then the face and then fuck me, if the nurse doesn’t appear out of nowhere just when I can’t make her aware of what is going on. I really am going to die now, but I don’t, no I just lie in bed in very British silence whilst I have one mini stroke after another, every fifteen minutes until I fall asleep around 4 in the morning from utter exhaustion.
About 5 minutes later I’m woken by the motherly nurse, taking my blood pressure, sticking a needle in my hand for blood sugar and taking my temperature, which of course were all absolutely normal.
‘Did you have a good night?’
‘Not really, I spent most of the night paralysed down one side thinking I was about to drop off my twig.’
‘Why didn’t you call me?’
I mutely gestured to the call alarm beneath its swaddling of surgical tape, I swear she went white and gasped ‘Why didn’t you shout?’
I looked at her, ‘Couldn’t, I was paralysed. Believe me, I tried but by the time it wore off you were at the other end of the ward.’
She looked at me as if I was mentally deficient, ‘So why didn’t you call once it wore off?’
‘I didn’t like to, everyone was asleep’ I said sheepishly, ‘and I didn’t want to get up in case it happened again’
‘Next time’ she scolded me ‘you bloody well shout as loud as you can, I’ll get that alarm looked at as soon as the day shift arrives.’
‘Am I alright to go and have a shower?’, I’d spent the night drenched in sweat and from experience knew that once everyone woke up there would be a queue for the showers.
“Just wait until the day shift arrives so they know where you are”.
As she says this the day shift duly arrives and she says, “Off you go then, I’ll tell them where you are”
I grab the washing kit, towel and clean clothes and head toward the showers. As I pass the nurses station a dumpy nurse looks up and says brusquely. “Don’t lock the door, you may have another seizure”
“Cheers then” I think as I set off down the ward, “Nothing like a little bit of reassurance”
The shower room is fairly large and I can’t work out how the tap works, it’s one of those single ones that change both the temperature and the flow in different directions.
I finally manage to figure out how it works and have industriously covered myself in soap when there is a knock at the door and a nurse’s voice says “Can I come in?” I can’t really hear her over the water so I turn off the tap but it turns the wrong way and all I manage to do is exponentially increase the flow and switch it to freezing cold.
“Fuck” I squeak, leaping out of the stream of glacial water. I can’t see a fucking thing and I can’t hear her over the thundering Niagara that I have precipitated. I brave the water and manage to turn off the tap and call “Just a minute”, wondering what I’ve done to deserve this.
Bizarrely she replies “I want to ask you about your menu”.
I’ve got soap in my eyes, I’m stark bollock naked and about to be joined by a 5’ 4” middle aged slightly grumpy nurse who wants to talk to me about menu preferences. My very erudite reply to her query was “Er” to which she replies “Never mind I’ll ask you later” and disappears out of my life.
I finish my shower in double quick time before anyone else decides to join me and have a naked discussion about menus or the state of the budget.
I climb back into bed and watch the waking ward with interest, the last three weeks have turned me into an avid people watcher.
My experiences of the night before have triggered a veritable avalanche of doctors, nurses and assorted medical practitioners frothing at the mouth and all wanting to stick pins in me for no apparent reason.
“Can you feel this?”
“Ouch”, I nearly leap off the bed as yet another needle is jabbed into my sorely abused flesh. This goes on for most of the morning, “Squeeze my fingers”, “Follow my hand with your eyes”, “Lift your leg, lift your other leg”, “Touch the tip of each finger with your thumb”
I am becoming positively Pavlovian, whenever a member of the medical profession approaches my bed I flinch automatically and by the end I can perform the whole barrage of neurological tests without being asked.
I’m just settling down when the dreaded phlebotomist arrives with her tray of torture implements.
“I need to take some blood, would that be OK”, she smiles brightly.
Now what I really want to do is to tell her “No, that won’t be OK, my arm looks like I’ve been mainlining heroin and you’ve already got at least three pints of the stuff why do you need more”
However being British all I manage is a pathetic ‘Of course’.
The pain caused by the taking of blood is in inverse proportion to the age of the practitioner and this one is young, very young, I would estimate that she is roughly thirteen years old.
As she whips the tourniquet around my arm I desperately try to make conversation.
“Have you been doing this long?”
“No, it’s my first week, you’re only my third patient. I’m still training.”
“Oh” I croak, “and how is it going?”
“Really well, I love it”, she taps the vein in my arm in a very professional manner, “I know it seems odd but I’ve always been interested in blood”
Oh great, I’m about to be operated on by a work experience vampire. As it turns out, she is really good at her job and I hardly feel a thing as she slips in the needle.
This however does not stop about a metric ton of adrenaline being dumped without as much as a ‘by your leave’ into my system. Fucking needles, I hate them.
...to be continued
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