123. The Right Place

In May 2013, click to see, in a post on this blog, I wrote:

I couldn’t do a nurse’s job. No words can convey the admiration that I have for those I met.  They were wonderful, patient, caring and kind.  Nurses tolerate the intolerable.  They work in impossible conditions and I think they are almost saint-like.

Let me be very clear, there are 175,000 nurses working in NHS hospitals and I think that 174,999 of them are wonderful. 

I’ll get to why I think that one of them isn’t in a minute, but did you see what I did just then?  I started the sentence with, “Let me be very clear.”  That opening is the thought-gathering prelude of choice for most of today’s politicians.  It has replaced, “Let me say this: ….” 

I heard John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, being “very clear” in an answer to a question as to why the UK should stay in the EU. 

McDonnell’s “very clear” response to the question was that labour voters should join with big business and vote to remain in the EU so that once firmly established within the European Union, the Labour Party could plot to overthrow capitalism.  At least, I think that was what he was saying. 

If I got it wrong perhaps he wasn’t being as “very clear” as he thought.

I was at hospital yesterday to have pre-operation checks before I have surgery on my ankle.  They have to make sure that I am fit enough for a general anaesthetic.  I have been given a date for the operation and it will be on June 23^rd. 

So, while you lot are all voting to leave the EU, I will be having my ankle bones cut and screwed together to fuse the joint.  By the new year I should be walking pain free.

I think the nurse was Portuguese.  I usually manage to make nurses smile or even laugh but this one was in deadly serious mode and was obviously not in the mood for any banter.

“We will start by taking blood,” she said and then she told me that the blood was to come from the inside of my wrist.

“It is to measure the gases,” I was told, “and the blood has to come from an artery, not a vein.  It’s going to hurt a lot and it will be much more painful than when you take blood taken from inside your elbow because there are lots of nerve endings around this area of your wrist.  When you feel the pain, you mustn’t move your arm.  That’s very important.”

I couldn’t think of anything amusing to say about that and so I kept quiet.  No nurse has ever been so brutally honest before and so I sat, trying to relax my arm and wishing that she hadn’t said anything about the pain.  I stared at a clock on the wall as I never look at the needle when they take blood.

“You are going to feel a sharp scratch,” she said.

“It’s not a scratch,” I muttered, grumpily.  “It’s a prick.”

I watched the second hand move from the 7 to the 10.  Nothing had happened.

“Well that wasn’t too bad,” I said, hoping to lighten the mood with a little joke.  “I didn’t feel a thing.”

I looked at the nurse and saw that she was staring at me, stony faced. 

“What are you waiting for?” I asked.

“An apology,” she said.

“What for?” I asked, in genuine amazement.

“Your rude language,” she said.

“My what!”

 “After I said you would feel a scratch.”

“What?  Are you serious?  A scratch is a long, narrow wound.  A needle makes a prick, not a scratch.  Sleeping Beauty didn’t scratch her finger.  It was pricked.”

She continued to stare at me.  “OK, I’m sorry,” I said.  It didn’t seem the right time to have a semantic discussion on the difference between a scratch and a prick.  I felt the needle go in and it really was painful.

“Don’t move your arm!” she shouted at me.

“I couldn’t help it.  It was involuntary.”

After about a minute, I asked if she was finished and she said that no blood was coming because I had moved my arm and so it was my fault.

“My fault was it?  Could it possibly have been yours?”

“No, you moved.  Your fault.”

I told her that I couldn’t guarantee not to flinch the next time and so she decided to take blood from my ear lobe instead.  (Don’t ask me!)

Two minutes later and after four “scratches” she had filled a narrow, transparent straw with blood from my ear lobe.  She put the tube into a machine and I watched as the blood started to be sucked out.  Then it stopped.

“It’s not working,” the nurse announced.  “It is clotting too quickly.”

“I suppose that’s my fault too?” I suggested. 

“We’ll do the walking test instead,” she said.  “You walk as fast as you can for six minutes while I monitor the oxygen level in your blood.  Are you right or left handed?”

“Why do you need to know that?” I asked.  “Do left handed people walk faster or something?”

“You have a walking stick.  If you hold the stick in your right hand, I will put the monitor on your left wrist.”

“Do you really think that right handed people always hold the stick in the right hand?  You hold the stick in the hand that helps the bad leg.  My left ankle is painful and so I hold the stick in my right hand to take some of the weight off my left ankle.  It’s nothing to do with me being right handed.  I would have thought you knew that.”

The nurse was not happy.  “If you continue to be rude, I will stop these tests and discharge you back to the consultant who referred you.”

“I won’t say another word,” I said. 

I was pretty sure that she couldn’t do what she threatened but I couldn’t take the risk that an operation I’ve been needing for four years would be postponed because of a silly squabble with a nurse.

I didn’t say a word for twenty minutes during which time I blew into various tubes and had an electrocardiogram. 

Then she took out a stethoscope and held it to my chest to listen to my heart.  I didn’t say anything but I knew she was going to have a problem.

“You’ve got a pulse but you don’t seem to have a heart,” she said at last. 

“That’s a bit harsh.”

“All I can hear is gurgling and bubbling from your oesophagus and stomach.”

I wasn’t surprised but I said nothing.  A year ago a doctor tried to listen to my heart and couldn’t find it.  Eventually he did find it about seven centimetres lower in my chest cavity than it should be.  It seems to have been chucked about and moved during my liver transplant procedure. 

When I told Caroline about my misplaced heart, she thought it was hilarious. 

“No one will ever be able to defend you again by saying that at least your heart’s in the right place,” she giggled.  “Because it isn’t.”

122 A Waste of Money

Caroline and I agree on most things and the things about which we disagree are never a real source of conflict.  If we ever have a disagreement, I find that once I’ve put my case again, succinctly and carefully, she will realise that she was wrong all along and any tension that there was between us, disappears.

Sometimes, even though I know that I am right and completely justified in the position I have taken, I relent and we do something that she wants and I don’t.  And, I’m not talking about anything trivial here like what we watch on television, although sometimes our interests in that respect seem to be so wildly at odds that I marvel at what a tolerant and agreeable person I have become.  I sat through the last series of “Bake off” in silence but through gritted teeth and surely that exemplifies my point?

However, there is a subject that is a perennial source of disagreement.  About twice a year we quarrel about holidays.  The argument is never about where we should go on holiday but about whether we should go away on a holiday at all.  I am always forced to concede and to lose that argument. 

Caroline, and other other people too, tells me that the thing about holidays is the “memories” but that is just nonsense.  Memories, unlike a new television set, fade and anyway, memories are of no real worth.  “Experiences” are of value but they are not the same thing at all as memories.

A few years ago my birthday was on a Saturday and Caroline decided that we would go away for the weekend.  We stayed in a hotel with a Michelin starred restaurant in Castle Coombe in Wiltshire.  I quickly calculated that the weekend was going to cost something in excess of £400 and I considered that was a lot of money to spend on sheer self-indulgence. 

“Would you like me to list all the better things we could spend £400 on?” I asked Caroline.  “Things that would be of lasting value and importance?” 

Caroline said that she wouldn’t so I didn’t.  But I did make a mental list of things we needed and that included a new vacuum cleaner as ours was on its last legs.   A vacuum cleaner would last for several years but a weekend away lasted, well…. just two days.

My memory of our trip to Castle Coombe was that it was very pleasant and I enjoyed it but I have no memory at all of what we did on the Saturday afternoon and no recollection of what we ate at dinner in the Michelin starred restaurant that evening.  However, I do have a memory of the bill.  I can remember it because it is seared on my mind: £460! 

The most expensive Which? “Best Buy” vacuum cleaner is £319.  See what I mean?  Point proven!

Three weeks ago something happened to my arthritic ankle.  Previously, as long as I could rest it every 100 paces or so, I could walk quite long distances.  Even a thirty-minute walk around the vast spaces of our local Sainsbury’s was possible.  But that is a thing of the past because now I need to use my walking stick at all times, even in the house.  

My ankle joint has suddenly deteriorated and become so painful that even a trip to the kitchen is only undertaken if it is absolutely essential.  Going upstairs to bed at night is a slow, painful exercise.  I am scheduled to have surgery on it in July and I hope things will be better afterwards.

A consequence of my severe incapacitation is that it will allow us to test my assertion that money spent on a holiday is of less real value than buying tangible, material goods. 

For several months we have been looking forward to a trip to New York in June.  It is our last opportunity to visit Caroline’s sister and her family before they return to the UK in August after spending the last two years in the States. 

We have had to cancel the trip and we are both very disappointed indeed.  New York, like London, is a city best seen from the pavement and I can’t “do” pavements anymore.  Thankfully, Caroline saw the plus side of this enforced change in our plans almost immediately. 

“We can get the house decorated,” she said.

Since we moved into our house four years ago, the walls of our hall, stairway and landing have been a rather unpleasant mustard yellow and the paintwork on all the wooden surfaces is tired, cracked and peeling.  We have vowed for four years to get it all fixed when we can afford it.  Now, thanks to my painful injury and travel insurance, we can. 

We have had three decorators round to give estimates and they have all quoted less than the money we will recoup for the cancelled air fares and hotels.

The best part is that we will enjoy the benefit of that expenditure for years and years and not just for 12 days.

Now I’m thinking about what else we spend money on that is self-indulgent and wasteful. 

I suppose that there’s always Christmas….