Thursday 14 April 2016

Roles Reversed

So, I went into hospital, in an ambulance and everything.  Excruciating abdominal pain involving attempts to vomit, attempts not to move a whisker.  Waves of pain that when at their worst made me shiver violently with teeth chattering with what became an almost mesmerising regularity.  Oh here we go again, big pain hit, count to 5 and here comes the shivering.  Apparently I have an interesting reaction to morphine.  My blood pressure decides it just wants out of here, through the floor or anywhere available and it all gets a bit swimmy.

And there was fella, having to deal with seeing me in massive pain and helpless to help. He strokes my head, and at one point I request his hand resting on my belly while both mine are occupied, what with blood pressure cuffs and morphine.

And I think I know what he's going through and I feel bad.  But I don't know if I do know what he's going through.  I hated being helpless when Dave was in the agony of the shingles head, nothing touching the hurt.  And that's what I assumed, so felt bad for fella as well as bad for me. Hell, eventually all I felt was the need for everything to stop.  I wanted unconscious, or I wanted a large knife to rip my own abdomen out.

I resolutely refused all suggestions of one sided pain or start to pain, and it felt really hard to insist that I was lucid and truthful but kept insisting it was a band across the whole.  Good job really or I might have had a random appendix surgery.  It was a blockage of my small intestine.

In the middle of all of this I somehow transfer to fella all responsibility for us.  He's the one who has to talk to the doctors because sometimes I can't talk through the waves of pain, although I try, and sometimes I am completely unaware of what's happening around me, and couldn't possibly repeat a history of what's happened since we first phoned the NHS helpline.  And I have to relinquish something, not entirely control but I need to depend on him to be the one who holds it all together, and I'm not entirely sure he can do it.  That's always been how I've seen my role, the one who competently manages to keep the plates spinning.

And it's OK, it's all OK, I go in on Monday evening and I'm out on Tuesday evening, confused, bewildered, shell shocked and tired, so damned tired.  All the shivering and the loss of a night's sleep has taken its toll.  Wednesday I cry, those relief kind of tears when you actually get the chance to cry after a trying experience.  Perhaps I should have screamed while I was on the trolley in the hospital corridor for what felt like hours, but I was in silent pain mode.  I didn't cry, I didn't scream.  I may have whimpered, perhaps twice.  And attempted to puke a few times, not that it helped.

And somehow on Wednesday I expect to be as right as rain, and oddly I'm not, and trying to be as right as rain is exhausting.  So that's me, learning to recover.  Trying emotionally to come to grips with an ambulance journey and a night in hospital.  It's a first for me.