Monday and it starts with getting up and walking down to the village chemist to collect my meds. That goes okay but by the time I am due to walk down to the GP surgery for my 13:20 jab appointment I am breathless and shaky, so much so that my partner drive me down and waits for me. I get called in to the nurses room and she prepares to jab me, which she does but notices how breathless I am and asks a doctor to see me. My GP is very concerned and rings the Cardiac Emergency department at the local hospital My partner drives me home, helps me pack what I need to stay in and drives me to the hospital.
And so the Angina adventure starts. I present my self to reception and get told to take a seat, they already have labels printed for me. I and my partner take a seat on the hard plastic chairs along with several other people. I look around at my surroundings. Quite stark with a few postcards stuck to the walls and typed notice under the television that is off. Its 14:25.
I get called in and I am triaged. Measurements taken and lots of questions asked, bloods taken and then I am back on the bloody hard waiting room chairs as we and the medical staff wait for the results to come back. In the meantime people who stated out at 9 o’clock in the morning at another hospital across town have been ambulanced over, so those poor bastards are at least 4 to 5 hours into this stuff already. From this point onwards time may become a little confused, I can only do my best.
My partner and I, we wait and we wait and we wait We get food from the little café stall in the hall way and we picnic, the decaff coffee making my partner feel really odd. We resort to playing “squares”, which is one of our ways of coping with waiting in emergency situations. I make a grid of dots in my journal (yes of course I took my journal of my ins and outs with me, I’m organised!)
The doctor called us in and spent ages asking me questions about how I felt, my history and what was going on for me. He says my bloods are normal, there’s a surprise. So the upshot is that they are going to scan me. I go back to the waiting area, where no else seems to have moved. After a while I get taken over over to a scanning room where a lovely lady lays me on a bench and runs a probe over my chest in a sort of Star Trek way, all the time talking to the doctor who had initially seen me pointing out the bits of my heart and speaking medical lingo hoping I would not understand. Apparently there was no signs of some thing but there might be a bit of “misalignment”. I of course get returned to the waiting room, only to be recalled with my partner later. The nice lady says it could be mild heart failure or angina she cannot tell which without a more clear and advanced scan. She thinks she is going to send me home so that I can be called in as an outpatient to get it in two weeks. The Cardiac Assessment Team have turned her down for a bed. Then she says I am “atypical” which for me appears to be a theme, all my arithmetic is good but am clearly exhibiting all the symptoms of fatigue, breathlessness and the other things that someone with mild heart failure or angina display. Suddenly she says I’m not happy with this give me a few moments and goes of to talk to the Cardiac Assessment team again. She returns and says your staying in, you have a bed. Mark those words carefully, you a have a bed!
Its now about 6 or 7 o’clock. The doctor walks me and my partner over to the Cardiac Assessment unit, I’m expecting to be met and taken to a bed where I can rest and be attended to. The rational for me staying in was that this would short circuit the two week wait for the advanced angiogram, that I would spend one night have the scan get a proper diagnosis and not need to wait two weeks to get the scan. What I actually walk into is a reception area packed with couples all waiting to be assessed. When my partner enquires what is going on she is told there are no beds available and it is going to be a six , yes 6, to eight, yes 8, hour wait for a bed to be free. I feel like I’ve fallen into a Kafka nightmare, having been given an aspirin and a “Cholesterol pill” before being shunted off to this cattle truck of a waiting room. My partner declares it a third world service. I find a recliner at the back of the room feeling truly shit.
I think it must have been about 9 o’clock when I told my partner to go home, there was absolutely no point in her waiting for me to get a bed she might as well go and get some rest I was not going anywhere soon and all I could do was wait. It could be any time between now and the morning. She left and later told me that she had got home safely having found her easily in the vast hospital car park, it was the only one!
During al this I had left a message for the specialist cancer nurse to say I was being admitted adn that I would not be taking my cancer pills and for her to inform ” he ha made a pact with the devil” and to give me advice going forwards. On the stroke of midnight a nurse approached, called my name and escorted me to the Clinical Decisions Ward bay T9, where there was a bed onto which I flopped.
Tuesday starts at midnight with me popping to the toilet to change into baggy pyjama bottoms and a Star Wars T shirt with ” I am your father” emblazoned below a head shot of Darth Vader. In my innocence I thought I would be left alone to sleep until seen by the doctor, an angiogram ordered and done and then some sort of diagnosis from which I and the medical world could proceed. How stupid could I be. At a quarter to one, that’s 0045 my vitals are taken and I am interrogated again and given something, no idea what because by the I could not give a shit all I wanted to do was sleep as I was extremely fatigued and yesterdays 28 jab site was getting sore. I buried my self into the bedding and began my sleep rituals and then became aware that I had been brought to a place Hieronymus Bosch would have been proud of. It would appear that Milton had constructed an additional layer of hell. Every one who was wired up to a vitals monitor was responsible for a continuous beep or chirp, it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a flock of electronic owls. Add to this the fact the that the guy to my left clearly was not at all clear about what was supposed to be happening and kept engaging the staff in conversations that ranged from lucid to tangential to say the least. To my left was Norm, a lovely 92 years who was having none of it and would be off at the drop of a hat still wired up to his monitor. I got quite fond of Norm, had to respect his indominatable spirit. To this has to be added the blazing illumination of the nurses station, the constant staff chatter and the random turning on of bay lights that accompanied whatever routine vitals were being run on whichever patient, at one point it was like a disco. At one point all the bay lights went out but the noise level from the nurses station coupled with the bloody electronic owls was incessant. I would defy anyone, who wasn’t pissed or drugged out of their heads to sleep in this environment. Given I was extremely fatigued, hungry, in discomfort and probably a tad concerned about being breathless and having been told I might have had mild heart failure or angina I cannot think of a better environment to make me more exhausted or to induce full blown heart failure. I was desperate. I then remembered I had my ear buds in my bag, what a stroke of genius that was to put them in my bag. I fished around and found them, plug my phone charger into the phone and the sockets above my bed for serious medical equipment and listened to Hungarian night on radio three. I did not sleep but I heard some lovely music and best of all I could not hear the bloody machines bleeping like some fiendish water torture.
It could not last. At 7 o’clock there was the news on Radio 3 followed shortly by the ward being woken up for vitals and the start of the hospital day. In what universe the day had been deemed to stop was any bodies guess. Droves of staff appeared for change over, they wandered round the ward exchanging information and numbered i-pads, I assume I had one on me. As they stopped by my bed, a nurse said ” this is Ronald”, Oh no its not, I say it Roland and realise that they had got my name wrong above my bed. I discovered over the coming hours that nursing staff seem to have difficulty Roland, particularly the Asian staff. This was definitely not a one off as it happened several times with different Asian staff. Fair do’s really I could never manage some Sri Lankan names of work colleagues at on place I worked at, but then I am dyslexic and names are not my strong point.
The breakfast trolley arrives, cornflakes and toast for me. The toast having been done by the toast monitor for the day. There then followed a very long time where I was ushered off my bed in to the chair next to it where I listened to Mark Steels in Town. I listened to several episodes. I’ve also managed to keep Norm from wandering off a couple of times and got the nurse to come to him. For 92 he can be pretty nippy and if not careful pulls all his wires out or drags the monitor with him. I am desperately tired and so I write in an attempt to keep going so about 11:30 I write this:
411
I feel I must write
perched on my hospital bed
after my latest fright.
It would appear my heart
has played a trick or two
to over come my rampart.
This plummet into purgatory
and Kafka like night
has redefined the horror story.
All night the beep machines
persist the misery of no sleep
like some dripping Chinese torture,
its my sanity it reaps.
My symptoms are extreme fatigue
but the chirping tossing room
is painful beyond what I can believe.
I cannot believe I'm trying to rhyme.
Bosch would be proud of this
Dante add an additional ring,
so much care with so many
unforeseen ill consequences.
I'm planning my escape,
forming a committee of one
but when it comes to it
I will probably just do a
runner,
actually more of a breathless
shuffle.
I am eyeing the walker parked up
across the way
no one will notice in this chaos.
Thank fuck for radio three
and ear buds. Hungarian night
has saved my head
as I lay trying to sleep on my bed,
damn I've tried to rhyme again
that's so not me, its so tame.
Enough, enough there is
nothing to be gained.
They serve lunch at the same
time as doctors rounds!
I fucking give up.
Yes they serve lunch as the consultant does his rounds. He gets to me. “No you have not had a mild heart failure, its probably angina. All your tests and x-rays are good. We will give you angina medicine and send you home. You will have an angiogram as an out patient. Good bye” Remember why I spent a night in hospital? Yep that’s right to get an angiogram quicker because I have the symptoms! It all been for nothing.
I wait for my new meds, have vitals done and settle down to wait my discharge drug and letter and my partner who is coming after 4o’clock. As I idle away more time the trolley woman arrives, a jolly, smiley person and as it turns out an observant person. “Roland would you like a drink? Of there are two Rolands, Oh there are two Roland Woodards!” She is right. Norm has my name above his bed. Really you could not make it up. No wonder the poor man has appeared confused if staff have been calling him Roland. The tea lady points it out to the team and it’s she who changes the name board on Norms bay. I check with a nurse that the bloods and scan that Norm have just had were not for me, I am assured they weren’t and I assume they did all the usual ID checks. My partner arrives and we chat for a while and Norm’s daughter and wife appear. His daughter looks at my name name board and says “are you from D….d”, to which my partner replies we are. “We live over the back of you, you just had your trees done, which is great”. There follows a conversation about the village and neighbour type things. I am now glad I heeded Gil Scott Herons advice, “If you can help someone along the way why wouldn’t you”. Having shepherded Norm to safety a few times and got the nurse to him sometimes he thinks I am a friendly man. So we now have neighbours whose dad thinks I’m friendly, karma. Mind you he won’t have a clue who I am today even though he was me for a while in hospital.
I have changed into my escape clothes and go to the toilet. When I come back there has been a major to do, Ed across the way has thrown his tea over the nurse. Trust me to miss the excitement. The heavies have arrived but it is de-escalating and things get cleared away. Ed has had no visitors and been sat in the chair by his bed all day and clearly quite agitated, I think he probably just got so pissed off he did not know what else to do. My discharge papers arrive with my new half a tablet a day meds and I am free to go. I say goodbye to Norm and his wife and daughter and leave with my partner. She guides me expertly through the hospital to the car park past the vapers and onto the car via the pay station. I am so relieved to get home. My partners friend is there. Fish and chips is the evening, its easy. I have few chips and go to bed. No beeps, no chirps, no chatter. It takes me a while and a couple of wanders to settle down but once I do sleep through to the morning.
Wednesday, I wake up and laze for a while, do my vitals before getting up, unpacking my hospital bag and making a fried sandwich for breakfast, I will deal with the alleged cholesterol association later. I take my meds and my new heart (half a tablet) and start to try and capture the past couple of days on the blog. I decide to rename for a period of time until the cancer stuff becomes clear, which it will do once I get the ASAP face to face appointment. It takes me until mid afternoon to catch up and I am tired and head achy so I intend to rest, perhaps nap and see how the day goes. But I will write no more today, hoping to be able to rest.
POST SCRIPT: My oncologist rings me at five o’clock and asks me what’s going on. I tell him what has gone on and he says he thinks its been a wrong call but he cannot interfere with the clinical stream they have decided. All he can do is contact them to get them to sped up the process of the scan. In the meantime we agree that I will stop my cancer meds for one month and then have a blood test before being seen by my oncologist. So my angina adventure will go on for a month at least. The downside is that the angina medicine gives me headaches.
