Today I returned to St Thomas’ for my pre admission health check. I’ve actually been back once since my last entry as I accidently neglected to have blood tests done (dippy cow), but we all know what bloody test are like so I won’t bore you with that – plenty of other stuff to bore you with.
Today was basically to check that I am fit enough to cope with the operation next week, which despite the efforts of the tens of randomers who have coughed or sneezed their stinking germs on me in the last week I appear to be (touch wood).
After a long wait for the lift I arrived at the plastic surgery department on the 11th floor. “Plastic Surgery Department” had previously conjured up images of Christian and Thingy’s offices on Nip Tuck, but oh how wrong I was. The NHS reality was somewhat different.
I’ve been doing a great job of pushing all this "illness" stuff to the back of my mind where it belongs, and I really have been just carrying on as usual. This weekend I began to get a bit nervous as things are becoming more imminent. Stumbling on one of the wards where I may be staying (which was actually where my directions appeared to tell me to go!) didn’t help.
Everyone looked so damned ILL! They looked quite grubby too- washing isn’t easy when you have to keep a wound dry. Great, I’m going to stink too!
“Plastic surgery” invokes images of “perfection”; perky boobs, lush pouts, unfeasible beauty and svelte bodies. Admittedly, thanks to Heat Magazine etc, botched boob jobs, deforming lipo and trout pouts also spring to mind, but that’s for someone else’s blog. Today I saw (as well of lots of grannies for some reason?!) the people who really needed plastic surgery. By that I don’t mean pig ugly people, I mean people whose bodies had suddenly been attacked by a formerly dormant little monster like a silent, invisible version of the thing in “Alien”. The monster has to be chopped out, but it leaves a hole that needs fixing. Some of the people looked as though the alien had sucked out a some of their body before it left, they looked gaunt and weak and a couple of them didn’t have a lot of hair. I’d forgotten. These were real cancer patients, which hopefully (the stats are on my side, and so is a lot of positive thinking/ prayer) I am not going to become.
I really don’t want to count my chickens, and I really REALLY don’t want to tempt fate as I won’t know for sure if this has spread or not until November 1st; but being in that ward today made me feel so incredible lucky to have had my health so far in life. I have to say, though, I’ve always been pretty aware of and grateful for that anyway.
Rather than just sympathy and dread I also felt incredible admiration for the ghostly looking people. In the search for pre assessment I followed an exhausted lady down a corridor. She looked as if she’d fall over in a gust of wind. She reminded me of the starving urchin boys you see in old black and white films set in LAAAndon in the Oliver/Jack the Ripper era. I was at least 10 meters behind her but she stood holding the door open for me till I got there. Although she was clearly weak, drained, totally knackered and very ill she still had manners. Many people in good health would shove you out the way as soon as look at you!
As for the Nip Tuck-esque decor my visions couldn’t have been more of a fantasy. From my brief glimpse I don’t think hospital wards have changed that much since I went to see my adoptive granny, Mrs Denton at Savernake Hospital when I was five.
Back in the waiting area (where I was meant to be) I was greeted by one of the campest men in his 60’s I have ever met! The lovely Brian took me off to the pre-admission room to ask me lots of questions I’d already answered about booze, fags etc.
I would have assumed that nurses would have been hardened to these things, but either his age, sex or inclination caused him struggle to hide a grimace as he asked when my last menstrual cycle had ended. It also appeared that the idea of me in my bra was too much to bear. When my sleeve wouldn’t roll high enough up my arm to get the blood pressure thing on (excellent planning ahead on my part as always) he took the reading through my shirt rather than have me take my top off!
“I’m sure you’ve seen it all before”, I said casually. The silence suggested that the answer was probably not if it was at all avoidable.
They also had to check if I was unwittingly carrying MRSA. After throat and nose swabs (my pride remained temporarily intact when I pulled the nose cotton wool bud out with no London bogies on it) I was handed another swab-in-a-tube. This was for the perineum swab. Brian asked if I knew what the perineum was, and seemed to delight in my description (which maybe reminded him of his holidays),
“The bit between the front and back exit?”
Au Renoir pride! Oh well, at least I got to go to the loo and do it myself. I’m sure Brian was mighty relieved about that too.
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