This is another story about the stupidity of youth visited on the adult. Again I’m having my life saved by a bunch of very smart people (all ladies as it happens) who have found potential time bombs on my skin and are removing them with extreme prejudice. It’s the only time I’ve had to firstly be put to sleep and secondly have to stay overnight in hospital after having an admittedly larger chunk of me than normal being removed from my person. When I woke up in the recovery room. I experienced something I remembered and immediately forgot the couple of other times I’ve been through step 1 of the lethal injection process. Immediately on waking I was aware of an extremely vivid dream and assumed I was still in it until the brain fog cleared sufficiently a few minutes later by which time I had completely forgotten what I was dreaming about other than that it was about….something extremely vivid. An anaestho-psychologist probably has a name for this phenomenon.
This one was tricky in that it’s on my shin where the skin is very tight. So the same plastic surgeon who is already somewhat familiar with my chest and my thumb will chop out the offending piece then cut a flap in my shin skin big enough and pliable enough to stretch over and cover the hole, then stitch it all back togetheragain. It was either that or another skin graft (as happened with the thumb) and the flap was considered to be a better option. Mine is not to reason why. I was going to say this was the Josef Mengele option but chose not to as it would be too offensive.
Now that it’s done, I can’t move it for a week or two and if I have to move around, it was going to be with the aid of crutches. I had extensive experience with crutches having broken my ankle as a 15 year-old playing rugby. So no issue there I thought, until I tried. I’m now using something that looks more like one of those walker things. That gives me five contacts with the ground (not counting my dodgy leg) instead of three. My chances or remaining upright improved by 66%.
I spent the last couple of days ranking the various offerings on streaming services we subscribe to so I can decide my viewing preferences while laid-up. There’re about a dozen series I’ve abandoned through waning to complete lack of interest. Having waited in vain for season 6 of Slow Horses, I guess I’m going to have to revisit the first 5. Or watch replays of the few games my football team has won this season.
Golf is out for at least a month. As I’m writing this I’m watching the ladies golf on Fox Sports on TV. I wouldn’t mind going to sleep right now as it’s after midnight but the bloke opposite me in this 4 person ward is snoring like a chainsaw. It did stop for while after what sounded like a minor struggle. Either he rolled over onto his front or one of my room mates shoved a pillow into his face. To balance the snoring with a higher pitch, alarms keep going off. I thought they were loud mobile phones and figured that was why the nurses in the nurses’ station immediately outside the ward door were ignoring them. In fact, their ability to ignore them is up there with the ability of your average middle and upper class Indian to not see the ubiquitous squallor around them. A nurse just told me it won’t be happening again tonight. It’s now 4.00am and they have started up again with a vengeance. Unlike on Netflix medical shows like “House” when an alarm goes off it means someone is in cardiac arrest or similar and requires a team of doctors to save them, here I think it means the tea’s getting cold.
Incidentally, I need to apologise to the gentleman opposite me who I can confidently say will never read this blog. Remember, this guy sounds like a train in a tunnel when his snore hits peak Fred Flintstone. The only comparable sound I can think of would have been emitted by our late cat, Eddie the Engine, he of the loudest purr in the world. Of course Ed would need to be about 15 times bigger and commensurately louder that he was as a fully grown (very fully in Ed’s case) cat. But I also assumed he (the bloke opposite, not Ed) was emitting occasional high-pitched farts until I realised it’s me. Well, not actually me but the machine hooked up to my one good lower leg. I have this cuff, like a blood pressure measuring cuff which wraps round your elbow, wrapped around my calf. It regularly expands and contracts to keep the blood circulation up and prevent clotting in said calf. When it deflates, well you now know the rest.
I know there’s a whole litany of first world problems here but is this what 46 years with the same private health insurer gets you? By the way, the food is better than your average airline food but not all of the TV channels work.