Blog 1 - Hospital Here I Come!

Round about, round about

’Lo and behold.

Reel away, reel away

Straw into gold

Rumpelstiltskin Brothers Grimm 1812

For my Boxing Day celebrations, I was admitted to North Shore Hospital. The next night, I had major bowel surgery: right hemicolectomy and laparotomy, words as hard to say as they are painful. For 37 years, scar tissue from a caesarean section had been suffocating my bowel like a noxious vine around a native tree. Dr. Ian Ong saved my life, but I only ever met him twice through hazes of morphine, and I never had a chance to say thank you. I thank strangers like the lady at the Warkworth tip who let me in late the other day. I thanked her so profusely my son whispered under his breath, "Please don’t say thank you again." I am addicted to making people like me, especially people I will never see again.

The pain started at 6 am on Boxing Day. It was like labour on crack. I was prepared to die to stop the pain, but visions of Gus swimming with a pod of dolphins in the Marlborough Sounds kept coming back to me, and I remember that moment; it was like unwrapping a present from God, and I wanted it just one more time.

As I lay writhing about in my bed at Leigh on Boxing Day, I knew what I had to do: ring Maryse, my older sister. She is married to Doctor Boyd, and the two of them have shared the care of me for the last 12 years since my husband, now extinct, left me emotionally destitute while financially controlling me.

Boydie takes one look at me and tells me to pack a toothbrush while Maryse makes him a cup of tea. Off we go to North Shore Hospital, with Boxing Day turning out to be a grand day to get sick, as there is only me and a Māori woman in the waiting room. She shows us her rashes, which she says are creeping to her secret places. Two young doctors (Morecombe and Wise) come to see me. I watch myself watching them as if we are all actors in some medical drama. Although they have stethoscopes around their necks, they seem much too young to be doctors, except on TV, of course. They are quite bad actors, as they don’t seem to know what they are doing. I wonder if, since I am old enough to be their mother, they are expecting me to tell them what to do. I pretend to be the patient, but I am not sure when to say it hurts as it doesn’t hurt where they are pressing on my tummy. They don’t seem to have any other tricks up their sleeve, so a CAT scan is done, a line is put in my hand, and morphine is administered. My last memory pre-surgery is of a youngish Asian doctor with sticky-up greying hair and the physique of an intelligent athlete kneeling beside my bed in navy blue Adidas shorts. He is totally focused on me while Morecombe and Wise hover in the background like two ball boys at a tennis match.

The next memory I have is late the next day. I am lying on a bed in a long line of beds in a corridor, waiting for my turn to be operated on. In the flickering twilight of a hospital, an enchanting young trainee anaesthetist in a floral shower cap is telling me that when I get into the theatre, I must bend over five times.

My next memory is waking up in a hospital ward. Pain medication has dulled every sensory perception. My children drift in and out. There is a woman in the ward coughing for her life, while another, with her blonde hair in a bob that brooks no nonsense, is propped up with a computer on her knees. I think she is an Avon saleswoman. I lie there like a stricken player in a rugby match. Slowly, my brain makes sense of Ward 8 North Shore Hospital.

The woman coughing is a Chinese woman as small and frail as a convalescing stick insect. She lies unmoving on a nylon mauve blanket. She rattles a lot and is told to breathe deeply as her lungs have collapsed. She has lung cancer, is allergic to penicillin, and a pastor comes in to pray for her. "Lord, don’t go away" we are praying for her, don’t go away, our Lord," and she rattles again like an alarmed baby.

The adaptation one must make after major surgery is brutal; one goes from being a fully functioning human being one moment to a fully dependent one the next. Some people, I’m sure, make the transition smoothly and competently, but I am not one of those people. I spend 5 days half-sitting, bent over with my knees not quite straight, sliding down the slippery mattress on thin sheets. On my last day, I suddenly discover there is a fifth position on the bed control, which allows the perfect sitting position, momentarily until the sheets slide down the mattress again.

The junior team of Morecombe and Wise are my post-operative doctors, with the more senior asking the questions and the junior taking notes. On the fifth day, I whisper to them that my bowel has done what a bowel is supposed to do, and they are very pleased with me. They politely decline to see a photo, but the older doctor smiles, leans over, and whips the plastic tube out of my nose. My dear soft little throat swallows like a baby trying solids. “I love you,” I sigh to my liberator. “I don’t know about that,” he replies awkwardly. I ask him his name, and his sidekick says, “Next thing, you’ll be wanting his number.”

I have been told to walk around the ward a few times a day. I am so exhausted, but I remember Frankie, my heart baby, being made to walk when she was just 6 and her heart had been repaired in Melbourne. Theo, her physiotherapist, would come into the ward, and Frankie would cry, “No Theo,” and he would say, “Your heart won’t kill you, but pneumonia will.”

I see the husband of the stick insect in the patient’s tea room, and he says, “My wife walked into this hospital, but she may not walk out. She’s in God’s merciful hands.”

My 3 boys came to visit me. They tell me they’ve been fishing and came face to face with a bronze whaler. I wonder idly if anyone would have told me if they had been eaten. Clemmie and Frankie bring me a book called Sorrow and Bliss and small capsules to rub on my face. They drive in every single day from Leigh, and they are so funny and awkward, and I want to be a strong, well mum for them.

My attitude to my little stick insect of a roommate, whose failing lungs are desperately searching for air, is changing. Nurses and doctors gather around her. They tell her they have exhausted all their options. My annoyance at her constant rattling morphs into tenderness, and I feel ashamed of myself and vow to be more tolerant of irritating fellow humans in the future. Sometimes I pull my curtain to peep at my roommate, and she lifts her little arm in a gracious wave.

I tell Leo, my doctor friend in Melbourne, that my stomach hurts, and he says that pain is good as it means you’re alive.

We have a new roommate who is a school bus driver. Her name is Leonora. Her long grey hair lies on the pillow, and she has the unlined olive but ruddy complexion of a non-drinking rural dweller who has her own hens. She loves being a bus driver, and every Monday, one little girl gives her a flower. Leonora is sad that her own kids haven’t come to see her but excuses them, saying petrol is expensive, but then can’t help herself and blurts out, “My bloody daughter-in-law has enough money for candy but not for gas.”

She tells me that when her son was small, his teacher rang to say, “Your son keeps laughing at me and making a noise in class.” So Leonora jumps on her Harley, goes to the school, marches into the classroom, and sits down beside her son until he behaves. I say, “You’re not a Taurean, are you?” and she says, “Yes,” and I understand why we connect, though we are such different fish.

I tell her I’m going to stay at my mum’s house. She asks, “Will your mother have you then?” and I think, mum has always had me.

I think of her standing gamely at the end of my bed, looking at me with the big tube up my nose. She turns to Moley, my younger sister, and says, “Of course she will come to me,” as if there were no other possibility in the whole wide world but that mum will make me better. She is yet again my next of kin. My last next of kin left me twelve years earlier, when, contrary to the lifelong commitment seen in the mating laws of ducks, rabbits, and penguins, he found another mate who offered him more in the enjoyment of mating rather than the purpose. I, on the other hand, have given him 6 offspring for which he shows no gratitude. In fact, if he were a polar bear, I rather think he might have eaten them.