I’ve been out of hospital since mid-September and I’ve had the best 8 weeks. I’ve been able to watch Big Fella play football, Big Girl play netball, ferry them both around, do school runs, walk the dog, cook dinner, go out with friends, go on Question Time, celebrate my 40th (that’s a whole other post!) have rainbow hair and just live life. But always in the back of my mind is the thought that at any time I could become ill and end up in hospital and that’s exactly what happened this week.
On Saturday evening I had a bit of a party to celebrate my 40th and had family and friends round to the house. I had an amazing time and even had a couple of cocktails and a cheeky slice of dominoes pizza. I knew that I wouldn’t feel good on Sunday but thought ‘sod it’ and did it anyway. I spent all of Sunday in bed, mainly recovering from the exhaustion, but luckily I didn’t really have any repercussions with my bowels.
On Monday morning I got up, took the dog for a walk and then went to the dentist. I had been a few weeks ago because I broke one of my bottom molar teeth on a crisp- yes, a bloody crisp! It was one of those expensive, hand cooked crisps mind but it just shows how weak my teeth are that that’s all it took to break it. My teeth have always been crappy and they just seem to crumble and most of them are held together with fillings and crowns. This particular tooth had already had root canal treatment on it years ago but when the dentist X-rayed it a few weeks ago it showed that the root curved round and went under the tooth next to it so it’s possible all the root wasn’t removed. Because of the root curving she couldn’t do root canal treatment again and recommended I have the tooth out. She referred me to the local dentist that does minor surgery but he took one look at my medical records, had a telephone consultation with me and then decided he wouldn’t touch me and referred me to the hospital. But the hospital have horrendous waiting lists and unless it’s an urgent cancer referral it’s just a case of joining the queue. However as the tooth is infected the dentists are worried that it could get worse and if it got into my bloodstream it could make me very unwell and cause me problems with my Hickman line and TPN feeding. Not only that but on my check up on Monday I discovered that there are two other teeth that the dentist recommends I have removed before they start to cause me real problems. She said she would follow up with the hospital to stress the importance of me having these taken care of asap but suggested that I speak to my Gastro consultant to see if he could write to the maxillofacial team to get me bumped up the list. I had planned to do this on my telephone appointment with him on Tuesday but that consultation never happened as I was admitted to hospital on Monday evening.
When I got home from the dentist I felt a bit rubbish; I was really tired, my whole body was aching and I was getting really bad pains in my bowels/pouch. I went to bed but I didn’t get much rest as I started to have awful diahorrea and was going to the toilet every 10 minutes. This in itself didn’t worry me too much as it’s something that does happen fairly frequently. However when I started vomiting in the early evening I started to think that maybe this was the start of another bowel obstruction. The last obstruction I had was in Cornwall and it terrified me how unwell I was and how quickly I became so poorly. So when Hubby saw that I was vomiting he decided that we weren’t going to take any chances and that he was taking me to hospital. Normally I would want to leave it a few hours or even until the morning but I agreed with him that it was better to go in and get looked at than stay at home and end up getting really sick.
Hubby rang the gastro/nutrition ward at QMC hospital to say that I wasn’t well. If they have a bed on the ward they can admit me without the need for me to go through A&E but unfortunately they were full. But because they knew I was going into A&E they could get onto the bed manager so I could go straight up there as soon as a bed did become free. F22 ward is the only ward in the hospital (other than Intensive Care) that has nurses that are trained to handle Hickman lines and administer TPN feeds so that’s why it’s important that I get onto the ward as soon as possible. Hubby drove to A&E and because I was in so much pain I couldn’t walk so he plonked me in a wheelchair to go from the car to the reception. Security is on the entrance to A&E making sure everyone is wearing masks and turning away the people who are accompanying patients. Luckily Hubby was allowed to wheel me in and register me because I would have struggled to do it myself. We couldn’t find the sick bowl so I had gone into hospital clutching a plastic haribo tub and I had my head stuck in that as he gave the receptionist all my details. A&E was completely rammed but I was transferred straight away to ‘majors’ where I was put on a trolley. Usually this means you get seen fairly quickly but this wasn’t the case on Monday night.
Now I’ve spent many an hour in various A&E’s over the years but I have never, ever seen one so busy. It was like we were in the middle of a war zone with sick and injured people everywhere you looked. The corridors were doubled lined with people on trolleys, there were people on trolleys in the middle of the department and the paramedics were lining up to handover their patients. I overheard some paramedics talking and some of them had been there over 7 hours! The nurses and doctors were run off their feet and you could see how stressed they were. At one point a nurse went to go and get a trolley to transfer a patient from an ambulance to the department only to find that they had completely run out!
I had taken my feed in with me and was hoping that one of the nurses from F22 would be able to come down to A&E to hook me up but I was told that couldn’t happen because there was nobody then trained to look after the line if there were any problems. I tried to be patient and not hassle the nurses but after 4 hours I still hadn’t been seen, hadn’t been given any pain relief and wasn’t being given any fluids. I made the nurse in charge aware that if I wasn’t getting my feed then I would need fluids overnight otherwise I would dehydrate as my bowel is unable to absorb fluids normally. She said that they would cannulate me and put some up but they were so busy it was another two hours before that happened. To be fair it was lucky that they were able to get a cannula in me as usually after numerous attempts they have to get a doctor trained to use the ultrasound machine to do it.
So I had been there 6 hours and I had been given one dose of IV paracetamol and had a bag of saline going through but I still hadn’t seen a doctor. It was another two hours before the doctor came and even then it was the briefest of examinations. They told me I would need to go to the surgical ward until a bed became available on F22 so I could be monitored by the surgical team incase I was obstructed and things got bad. At 5am I was moved to the ward and my heart sank when I realised that after 9 hours on a hard A&E trolley I wasn’t going to be getting into a soft bed but a bloody rock solid surgical trolley.
On Tuesday morning my surgeon Mr E came to see me and explained that he hadn’t heard anything from St Marks yet and he was still in no rush to open me up until he had. Although I was still in pain the vomiting had subsided and my stomach wasn’t massively distended which were good signs that this wasn’t going to be too serious this time. I was finally moved to F22 in the early evening and after 19 hours on a trolley I was so grateful to get myself onto the soft hospital bed. I even had the luxury of pillows which I hadn’t had up until that point!
It was funny because some of the nurses on F22 didn’t recognise me with my rainbow hair; one even walked straight past me and later said she had no idea it was me. They’ve all said how nice it is to see me looking so much better and they’re so chuffed when I’ve told them how amazing the last 8 weeks have been and that I’ve been able to do things I could only have dreamt of doing six months ago. The doctors don’t think I’m fully obstructed this time and the fact I’m not vomiting supports that but there’s definitely something going on inside. My bowels haven’t worked since coming into hospital so they’re keen for them to start before they’ll let me go home. They don’t want to send me home only to bounce back in a few days time so I’ve had a lovely enema this afternoon to try to get things moving. I’m really hoping to be home in a day or two but I am a bit gutted that I’m going to be missing the school mums annual Christmas meal tomorrow night. But I’ve been able to do lots in the last couple of months so I don’t feel like I can complain too much. My only hope is that when I get home I stay well enough for Christmas. Last year I was so poorly that I only managed a couple of hours out of bed on Christmas day and then I was admitted to hospital on the 27th December. I had to do all my shopping online and a lot of the responsibility to get things sorted fell to Hubby. This year I want to make up for how shite last year was and spend the whole day giving the kids my undivided attention. But so far I haven’t bought a single present (apart from a couple of toys for the dog) so I need to pull my finger out and the shopping started.
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