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.”