Thursday, May 30th, 2013
Another soggy day feeling flat, depressed and exhausted... and that's just me...! Over in the Wacky World of the NHS, things seem a lot better, judging by the 25 second telephone call I receive at work at 9.30am from mum "Just to let you know that I'm okay..."
The 10.30am telephone call is to tell me that they are going to do the Gastroscopy this afternoon ("so you can ring to enquire about me before you come to visit tonight" - not that I was planning to this evening, of course...) so there's another "nil by mouth" lunchtime to get through, which will no doubt cause another bout of the grumblings...
That said, I decide not to call the ward for updates later, basically because it's Thursday and my experiences with the Thursday staff last week did not fill me with confidence or make me want to talk to any of them unless I absolutely had to.
Friday, May 31st, 2013
Perhaps the worst aspect of missing a day's visiting is that it seems doubly hard to drag yourself there the following day. It's like a switch has flipped in your brain telling you that you were doing this a long, long time ago and then you have to remind yourself that it was only the day before yesterday and that the ongoing routine really hasn't changed at all.
Nevertheless, for various reasons far too tedious to go into here (which means that they MUST be...), I was running late as I pulled into the car park tutting as yet another driver insisted on ignoring the huge white arrows and went around it the "wrong" way. Happily, before those delays happened I had been able to pop into a local "metro" style supermarket and grab a pack of white chocolate buttons and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits to (possibly unwisely) restock mum's "treatie drawer..."
Of course, mum didn't seem all that pleased to see me, if I'm telling the truth, immediately telling me that I "needn't bother" staying and that her stomach was playing up again, which probably explained the bags of washing I would have to take away with me.
As I arrived another Magnesium infusion was being set up and, in terms of her fellow patients, it was pretty much "all change" since the last time I'd been there, so some people do actually manage to escape, it seems, although one of the remaining regulars seemed to be having a conversation about "oozing" which I could have done without accidentally overhearing.
There had been no visitors since my last one two days ago, but that was probably just as well, as yesterday's gastroscopy (Ta-dah!! Finally!) had proved exhausting, apparently, and she remained dopey enough that I curtailed my visit before forty minutes were up, although that still gave mum enough time to get tetchy with me over how "important" her "missing" Get Well cards were (although I found them on the shelf beside her bed), and to endure the long process of watching her fill in tomorrow's menu requests.
Saturday, June 1st, 2013
And so we enter another month, the sixth consecutive one this year touched by the need to be visiting hospitals with a depressing inevitability. Saturday begins with another early-ish but brief call from my mother saying that she was all right and had had a "reasonably undisturbed" night which allowed for imagined daggers to be glared across the ward at some miscreant or other.
Still, it didn't matter much because I'm on a routine of alternate days now and my Saturday was probably all my own to squander on failing to make the most of another opportunity or twelve. Much of the early day was wasted on the internet having one-sided chats with people who didn't care, which, when you think about it, is very like the average hospital visit.
Still, it didn't matter much because I'm on a routine of alternate days now and my Saturday was probably all my own to squander on failing to make the most of another opportunity or twelve. Much of the early day was wasted on the internet having one-sided chats with people who didn't care, which, when you think about it, is very like the average hospital visit.
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