Mostly these days I write trivial posts, but it is useful sometimes to remember what started me blogging…
7th February, 2016, was also a Sunday. When I got up, I didn’t feel right. But I didn’t feel wrong. I wasn’t in any pain. We had arranged to go to the cinema, and I didn’t want to disappoint. But I asked Mrs Bump to drive. I sat through the film, preoccupied, worrying.
I left it, to see if I felt better the next day. I didn’t. Mrs B harangued me to go to our GP. When I saw him, he thought “stroke”. By that time, I was having trouble walking. He told Mrs B to drive me to the hospital, asap. An ambulance? Forget it! You’re much quicker if you make your own way.
At the hospital, I saw a doctor, who did some tests and arranged for an MRI scan. Whatever he saw, he sent me home.
The rest of the day, I sat at home, worrying, for I was still none the wiser. The one thing we thought it could be, we’d been told it wasn’t.
Tuesday, worrying.
Wednesday, still no improvement, we repeated the process. Mrs B had to get me into the hospital building in a wheelchair by now.
This time, they admitted me. You hear about all these wonderful, clot-busting meds. Not for me. I figure that, by then, I had had the stroke four days earlier. Instead, I lay on the bed, totally unable to walk.
In hospital, they changed every med that I had been taking. If they made wholesale changes, then maybe I wasn’t on the right meds in the first place? Spilled milk. My “treatment” was physiotherapy for an hour a day. I underwent several tests, all of which were negative. In the end, the doctors concluded that it must have been caused by my underlying conditions.
After five weeks, the physiotherapists got me walking again, tentatively. I still had nothing in my arm. I thought, at the time, that the decision to discharge me was premature, but this is the health service that we have chosen. Rather than it being too little treatment, never again would I warrant that much of anybody’s attention.
The hospital arranged my return home. Finally, I saw my ambulance. They dispatched an emergency ambulance to take me home!
Arriving home, I had a pile of laundry. So, my first task was to start the washing machine. Bending down, I lost my balance and fell flat on my face. I was uninjured but it took ages before I figured how to lever myself back onto my feet.
One other thing I had missed was a bath. Just before looking forward, at last, to a proper night’s sleep, a nice, long soak. And… one last problem to be solved that day – how on earth do I get out of here?