Friday 29 September 2017

Darkness and Stefan

This morning I woke up at 5 AM, following a bad dream about Pope Francis. I searched my mind for compelling reasons to get up, and I didn't find any, so I stayed put until 7:30 AM.

Staying in bed until 7:30 is not really a good idea because I don't have a lot of time for goofing off. My husband is in a hospital clear across town, and travel time is, there and back, about three hours. I visit him for two hours every day. By the time I get home, I am very tired. Therefore, my best writing time is, as usual, first thing in the morning.

Usually I visit B.A. after 6:30 PM, but I hate walking through the woods to an empty house after dark, so this week I went to the earlier visiting session. I felt guilty and cowardly about being so scared of the woods until B.A. got moved to Stefan's room.

I first saw Stefan (not his real name) a couple of weeks ago. He was an arresting sight as he walked down the hall, even for the Neuro ward. He had two black eyes and a bloody broken nose, and I'd never seen anyone who looked that bad on his own two feet. I thought he must be a car crash victim.

When B.A. got moved to Stefan's room a week or so later, I quickly glanced at the whiteboard over Stefan's battered head and ascertained that he was a Pole. This was unusual for the ward, actually, which is full of Scots patients. The nurses are a little less homogenous, and the doctors are definitely a mix of nationalities, but so far all patients I've seen, except Stefan, have been Scots.

One thing I noticed about Stefan, besides his shaved head, black eyes, broken nose and Polish name, was that nobody ever came to visit him. I felt badly about that and considered going over and trying to have a conversation, but I felt rather shy. Speaking Polish when you're not Polish and, incidentally, living in Scotland is a bit like being a giraffe with five legs--or, worse, Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles.


So when Polish Pretend Daughter appeared one day last week to go home with me after the late visiting hour, I sent her to speak to Stefan, who had gone to the TV room, possibly to escape the sight and sound of poor B.A. throwing up. When I fetched PPD, Stefan was smiling cheerfully, and PPD held the answer to the mystery of what had happened to Stefan.

In short Stefan, who lives in Fife, was walking home alone one Saturday night after drinking, and he was attacked by a group of men who had also been drinking. They kicked his head in, and Stefan ended up in the Neuro ward.

PPD did not ask if men were Poles or Scots. This  would make a difference to the headlines, if not to poor battered Stefan. If the men were also Poles, there would be no real news story. If the men were Scots, however, there might be a "hate crime" angle, which would be very interesting to the newspapers indeed. I have tried to find a report about it online, without success. Any number of men get their heads kicked in on Saturday nights in Fife.

At any rate, I no longer felt quite so badly about going to the hospital during "work hours" because Stefan's bruises and stitches were a daily reminder that Central Belt Scotland is a dangerous place for those who walk alone at night.

I have been feeling incredibly stressed out from trying to do my job adequately between daily trips to the hospital. This morning I made myself phone up an interview subject in Poland, but I forgot to  check the information I received that he was fluent in English. When the subject indicated that he would rather I interviewed him in Polish, six years of memory work simply vanished from my head. Reduced to a gibbering wreck, I took down the subject's email address. It was only after I hung up that I realised that

A) I had never before spoken Polish on the phone and
B) the subject may be "fluent" but some of my fluent-in-English friends absolutely hate speaking English on the phone.

If I still had any kind of ego around my language-learning skills, it would have been thoroughly bruised. However, I know using the telephone in a foreign language is a massive challenge for most language-learners. And three hours later I managed to cover myself in glory at the hospital when a nurse gave up trying to explain to Stefan that he couldn't have all his stuff back.

"The police need it for evidence," the nurse had been saying from behind a curtain. B.A., who has hearing like a bat, had motioned for me to be quiet and was listening intently to the drama. When the nurse hurried past us, muttering that she couldn't speak Polish, B.A. volunteered that I could.

She was very glad to hear it.

So off I went behind the curtain to introduce myself formally to Stefan and explain to him that he couldn't take all his stuff because the police needed it. Stefan said he understood, and off I went back to my habitual seat beside B.A.'s bed to ponder what "evidence" was in Polish (świadczenie, among other words). And I was highly gratified when Stefan, stymied by the more thickly Scottish accent of the next nurse, came in search of me to translate again.

Fortunately for him, I was just a stop gap. There is at least one Polish nurse at the hospital, and she appeared twice, first to convince Stefan that it was time to go home and then to take him out to a cab. The gentle patter behind the curtain, was quite a contrast to my lurching, tortured explanations all in the super-correct Second Person Formal. ("Sir cannot have Sir's things because the police need Sir's things for the court.")

Benedict Ambrose will be in hospital for at least another six weeks,

*I wonder if there are Anglo-Saxon analogues to Long Duk Dong in foreign films.

Friday 22 September 2017

Pilgrimage to Ven. Margaret Sinclair

My husband has been praying for the intercession of Edinburgh's 20th century saint, the Venerable Margaret Sinclair, for the miraculous disappearance of his tumour.

As you can see from her honorific,  Margaret is only on the second rung of the ladder to full-fledged canonisation. If she is indeed in heaven, and she wants her admirers in Scotland and abroad to know it, then here is an opportunity for her to "do a miracle" in the good old-fashioned way.

To participate more fully in Benedict Ambrose's petition, I am going to go on a walking pilgrimage from our house to Venerable Margaret's shrine at St. Patrick's Church in the Cowgate, which is about a five mile distance. When I get there, I'll go to confession, if I'm there in time for confession.  My friend and I will leave here at 9:30 AM BST, so if you're awake, please pray for us and, especially, for my husband.

Here is an account of the life of Venerable Margaret Sinclair--and a miracle she may have already worked.

(To the non-Catholic reader: we don't believe that saints themselves do miracles. Rather, we petition saints to intercede for us with God, in the same way you might have asked the baby of the family to ask your parents for some particular treat. Naturally it is God who grants the favour, thanks to the intercession of the saint. Suddenly I remember--once again--that time I was naughty at nursery school and the teachers took my cookies away. Seeing I had no cookies, my little brother shared his with me, Yes, I remember.)

Meanwhile, PPS has convinced that Beautiful Young Lady to marry him. I'm so glad she said yes (or, presumably, tak), not only because PPS seems rather fond of her---and I like her---but because he bought the ring before he asked. 

Sunday 17 September 2017

Good Nurses

I like the nurses at the hospital. They are professional, attentive and take the obstreperousness of the bantering men in their stride. They bring my husband three meals a day and note down how much he eats. They weigh him. They check his blood pressure several times a day and write that down. They remind him to drink more water.  They remind him that if he doesn't drink, he'll  have to have the fluid tube, and if he doesn't eat, there's a tube for that, too, and it isn't very nice. They also check him for bedsores.

B.A. does what the nurses tell them.

Respect.

The physio hasn't been by, but B.A. had a second operation this week, so physio has been abandoned for now. I don't even ask about that. I just turn up every day, sit by B.A.'s bed, observe the latest embroidery on his scalp,and which tubes are in or out, watch the nurses, relate the news.

The latest London Tube bombing was a "good news" story, believe it or not, as the bomb didn't go off properly and "just" singed a few people.

My visits are a ward fixture. I'm on first name basis with all the men who were in the room when B.A. was settled into it, and if he's stays, I'll be on first name basis with the young man who came in the day before yesterday. I provide a little supplementary nursing, too, just because I'm there. The other day, I handed a cardboard "bucket" to another man on the ward to throw up in.

Meanwhile Polish Pretend Daughter and her husband have come to stay with me.

This is, of course, only a very brief sketch.

Monday 11 September 2017

A Much Better Day

Since I have harrowed up your souls with this morning's post,  I must in justice tell you that B.A. is doing so much better now that he has been operated on. He is so much more like his old self.

When I turned up today, I found out that he has got a proper physiotherapist at last. She taught him how to use a contraption he refuses to call a Zimmer frame, and he pushed it down the hall to the Patient Waiting Room where we had a good chat. He is very cheerful and getting along well with his three roommates. They all banter madly together and with the nurses in that inimitable Scottish way.

There is also a chart at the end of his bed monitoring how much food he has eaten. Also, I am delighted to say, he ate three square meals today. My goal now is to make sure he stays in the hospital long enough to gain weight and be able to walk without a prop.

But I am utterly exhausted, so that's it from me for now. When I was on my way for a sandwich from the nearby Waitrose between the two "visiting hours" periods, I got completely lost and spent my whole "dinner hour" taking buses back to the hospital.  I'm chalking that up as one more symptom of "tired brain."

Update (Wednesday): AND I forgot a bag of laundry on one of the busses on  the way home. However, I found it today at the Lost Articles office, so now the clothes are washed and drying on the line.

Astonishing Recollection of a Terrible Week

One day I will return to these posts about my husband's illness and be simply astounded that we went through all this. That's the hope anyway. Occasionally I wonder what I would have done had we had children, but that's simple: they would have been packed off to Canada months ago. It would have been very good for their French, and I suspect my brother would have signed them up at once for karate.

Last week was one of new horrors, and I was furious with myself for having cravenly whisked Benedict Ambrose away from the hospital when he could have been there at least an extra day and  seen a dietician. That said, his mobility was deteriorating there. I didn't cajole him outside for a walk for a few days--the trip home was exhausting enough, and the next day he threw up--but when I did get him outside, he could manage only one circuit of the front quadrangle. He didn't get physiotherapy at the hospital; clearly the physiotherapist saw him only to tick the boxes that said he legally could be sent home. 

Both the hospitals we frequent in Edinburgh have big posters insisting that patients should change out of their nightwear and to get out of bed and walk. A week in bed ages the muscles by ten years, claim the posters. Thus I made myself argue with B.A. to get him out of bed, to put his slippers on, to go outside, to walk the circuit, to walk the next circuit. 

"I can't," said B.A. 

"You CAN," I said. 

But the story doesn't end with B.A. doing a ten mile race alongside cheering crowds. No. Not so far anyway. What happened were two terrible falls, a call to the local surgery, being snapped at by the duty doctor, two paramedics and an ambulance. Because it was true. He couldn't, and he can't. 

That was Wednesday and Thursday. On Tuesday night, I decided to sleep in the guest room across from the bathroom, so I didn't keep B.A. awake, and he wouldn't wake me up with all his frequent wakings and muttered complaints. At 1 AM, I was awoken anyway by the sound of B.A. going to the loo.  I got up, opened my door and saw him weaving in the bathroom doorway.

"Alright?" I asked.

"I'm alright, darling," said B.A. or something like that. I was back in bed before I wondered if I should have taken B.A.'s arm and escorted him back to bed and then---CRASH!

I was out of bed in a shot, and poor B.A. was on the floor moaning "My neck, my neck." And because I had absolutely no idea what to do and because my experience of the NHS is people doing as little as possible, I didn't call an ambulance. I know now that if someone falls and says "My neck hurts," you call an ambulance.

Fortunately, B.A. had not broken his neck, and wasn't concussed (which was all I could think of; neck-breaking never occurred to me), and so I led him back to bed and got in with him, intending to wake him up every hour like the woman on the phone said to do the first time he fell and hit his poor head, months ago.  Instead I slept like the dead. 

B.A. fell again that evening sometime between 6 PM and 7 PM, and that was my lowest moment ever. I had worked all day* on my journalism and reluctantly got up to A) make dinner and B) take B.A. out for some exercise. 

B.A., as usual, complained and told me he couldn't do it and he was tired, etc. I begged him, ordered him, reminded him of the posters, told him his not being able to walk was because he had chosen to lie in bed all day, and shouted before stomping off to make dinner. Not very nice.  And when I returned, B.A. slowly got out of bed, almost stood, and then crashed to the floor, hitting his head on the wall, and then on the floor, grazing his forehead and his nose. 

And I collapsed on the floor myself, wailing and then banging the floor with my fists and screaming  "I don't know what to do. I simply don't know what to do. And I am all alone. There's nobody else. And I am simply not qualified. I have no idea what to do."

Poor B.A. was very dazed. I think I must have helped him into a chair. Blood was seeping from the grazes. 

"The room is spinning around," he said. 

Once again, I should have called the bloody ambulance. However, I had no idea this was "important" enough to call an ambulance. Because, you know, 999 is so sacred compared to the NHS 24 hotline, and I have called NHS 24 so many times already, and a lady on the phone saying "And can I speak to your husband?" wasn't going to get his grazes attended to. So instead of calling 999, I ran about the flat trying to find antiseptic wipes. We were completely out of antiseptic wipes. 

In the end I called my kindly neighbour, and she and her husband came over with antiseptic wipes. At that moment, my sister-in-law, the doctor, phoned, and we had a long talk in the bathroom about how important it was that B.A. see his neurosurgeon. Ma Belle Soeur was really worried that B.A. had been released from hospital without seeing his, or any, neurosurgeon. She was adamant that he must. I said I would call the neurosurgeon's office in the morning. 

The night passed without incident. And in the morning I called the neurosurgeon's secretary's answering machine twice, and went to see my Italian tutor because A) I hadn't had time to email him and cancel and B) I know firsthand how awful it is to lose an hour's teaching wages. And it was very therapeutic to tell my Italian tutor, in Italian, everything that had been going on and then to think of something else, i.e. what are the most frequent grammatical mistakes made by anglophones learning Italian, for half an hour. 

Upon returning home, I called the local medical centre and asked to speak to the duty doctor. The duty doctor called me back, and after I listed off a catalogue of woes, he ripped into me.  Apparently I had called the emergency line THREE TIMES [in history] and ALWAYS ON A THURSDAY.  He had told me the LAST TIME that I should call FIRST THING in the morning because my calling at noon messed up the schedule and if he sent out a doctor to me that would really inconvenience the people in the waiting room, etc., etc. 

I was utterly dumbfounded. And when a doctor arrived, questioned B.A., said he might have a broken   neck and called an ambulance, I thought about that awful duty doctor and wondered how he would feel if B.A. did have a broken neck.  

As directed, I held B.A.'s head straight, and when the phone rang, the doctor answered it. It was Mister [X], the neurosurgeon.  I held B.A.'s head straight with one hand while holding the phone with my other and being simultaneously grateful and impressed that the neurosurgeon had actually called me because, at this point, it was better than--and just as surprising as--Pope Benedict calling. 

Two massive paramedics appeared in the tiny guest room, and there was some discussion about how to get B.A. and his new neck-brace down 3 flights of  late 17th century stone stairs. In the end B.A. walked down,  a paramedic in front and a paramedic behind. He was carefully strapped onto a bed in the ambulance, I got in, and off we went. Yes, I believe there were tourists in the House at the time.  

Apparently the rest of the  staff was terrified for B.A., but they all kept their distance because they didn't want to get in the way. That was very kind of them, really, and the best decision. 

So for the first time in either of our lives, B.A. and I went to the hospital in an ambulance, and although I remembered my keys and phone, I forgot my wallet. However, I phoned French Pretend Son-in-Law from the waiting room, and he came within half an hour and loaned me £20 so I could get home eventually. 

After two hours, I asked if B.A. was out of the x-rays yet, and was sent along to what is sort of the triage department and found B.A. on a wheeled bed. All told, we were in the Emergency Department from 2 PM until almost 11 PM, and the people there were really kind to us. When I asked a young nurse for a pillow for B.A., he remembered to bring it. And a nurse practitioner remembered us from neurosurgery and smile at us often. One of the paramedics asked me how B.A. was doing. So those were the "people helping" Mr Rogers famously said children should look for in sad times. 

Unprecedentedly, we were told, Neurosurgery had called Emergency before Emergency called them, to say that B.A. should be transferred to Neurosurgery as soon as they had a bed ready, and so B.A. and I went by ambulance to Neurosurgery. 

B.A. asked if I could stay overnight in the Family Room because he was scared of what might happen to me going home late at night, but the nurse was reluctant--the Family Room is really for families who come from Far Away (e.g. John O'Groats)--and so was I,  having spent a very poor night in the Family Room back in March. So I went home by cab and phoned the ward to leave the message that I was fine. 

And then it was Friday.  B.A. fasted all day, waiting for the operation that never came.  A surgeon came to see B.A., explained to us why B.A. needed the operation. He was forced to retract his statement that B.A. would be home a couple of days after his op, when I informed him that B.A. would not come home until he could walk.  

"I'm so glad you were here when he came," said B.A., and this was better than a fur coat and a diamond necklace or any other present I can imagine.

I went home by bus before dark. When it was determined that B.A. wouldn't be operated on that day, he had dinner. 

And then it was Saturday.  Thank God, I broke all the visiting hours rules and arrived at 10 AM because I soon discovered B.A. had had a very bad night. He had been sedated and put in solitary confinement. He was still frightened and disoriented when I got there. At his request, I read him all the prayers and readings for the Trad Mass of the day, including the set prayers for afterwards. 

B.A. fasted all day, waiting for the operation that never came.

And then it was Sunday.  B.A.'s operation--his third--happened on Sunday between 12 and 4: 30 PM. Having ascertained by phone at around 8 AM that he was well-rested, I had carried out my usual Sunday schedule. When I got to the ward at 3 PM., B.A. wasn't in his room. 

I was told that he had gone into surgery at noon. I was rather frightened, as B.A.'s last surgery had lasted only about 2 hours.  But there was nothing I could do, so I sat in the neurosurgery waiting room until someone turned on the television, and then I went to the chapel, where I prayed the rosary until I got the call that B.A. was back on the ward. 

I scurried back upstairs, and there was B.A. under an oxygen mask, his beard trimmed right down but his moustache left bushy, so that he looked like a British soldier who had been ambushed in Afghanistan in the mid-19th century and wandered around the desert for a few days before rescue. 

"My beads,"  said B.A.. "They should be in the pocket of my dressing-gown. Are they there?"

His old green bathrobe was lying on the foot of the bed. I reached into the pocket and found the worn old rosary he bought from a Romany pedlar woman in Poland in 1990.  He loves it so much, I don't usually bring it to the hospital, lest it get lost, but it was the only one I had in my bag on Thursday. So after I showed it to him--and he relaxed--I put another rosary into his hand, and put his Polish rosary back in my bag.

I sat with him from 4:30 PM until 8 PM, ignoring the mid-point chuck-out time, and took various buses as far as I could before calling a taxi because have spent so much on taxis. Actually, a friend called the taxi for me, because although my brain is starting to do very weird things (which does not surprise me, since I keep reading popular science books about the brain and what stress does to it), I had the very good idea to go to the home of friends, out of the rain, dark, and cold, and ask to call from there. 

I had bought what the Scots call a donner-kebab, so I sat at a proper dinner table with proper friends and ate my donner-kebab washed down with proper Strong Drink, which I felt I sorely needed. We had a good chat about Cardinal Burke's Glasgow Mass and other interesting things, and then the taxi was called, and I went home and went to bed. 

And now it is Monday, and I am gathering strength for the next battle, which is to keep B.A. under medical supervision until he can walk properly. He didn't break his neck, but he could have broken his neck, and he's not going to break his neck because he's going to get all the medical treatment he needs from his country, no matter what I have to do or say to get it, no matter whose duty roster is messed up or which NHS targets won't be reached.

*Amongst other things, my memory for all the appointments is patchy. I hadn't worked all day because I had taken B.A. to a different kind of surgeon altogether by wheelchair and cab. The bizarre NHS story there is that the receptionist refused to tell me what the surgeon's name was, on the grounds that she couldn't pronounce it. When I asked her to write it down, she told me to ask a nurse. 

Sunday 3 September 2017

Deep Work

This week I wrote 10 articles and visited Benedict Ambrose in hospital everyday. On Friday evening he told me that the doctors had done all the tests they deemed necessary and wanted to send him home. So I asked a nurse to get me a wheelchair, and after a conversation with a doctor, I took B.A. and all his stuff to the taxi rank.

B.A. was sick on Saturday afternoon, and I stared out the window, collecting my thoughts, before stripping B.A. and the bed, redressing B.A. and the bed, and then doing the laundry. B.A. wasn't sick in that way while in the hospital, so obviously there was something wrong with home. It was a very unwelcome thought. 

After an online consultation with Ma Belle Soeur, I decided what was wrong was the bed: if B.A. lies down all the time, it is very bad for him. However, sitting up in bed is apparently very uncomfortable. A hospital bed costs £4,000, so that's out of the question. A domestic reclining bed, though less expensive, is still expensive--especially as we bought a new bed this year. Thus, tomorrow I will go to a special shop for the elderly and chronically ill for a back rest and see what else they have for sale that might be useful. 

On bus rides to the hospital, I read Cal Newport's Deep Work, and while at home, I put its principles into practise.   Deep Work teaches "knowledge workers" how to concentrate hard enough and long enough to get more work done in a shorter amount of time. Controlling how much time you spend on the internet--and how you spend it--is very important. 

Now every morning, I write down all the tasks I have for the day, and I write a bullet-point plan for how I am going to do them, even outlining how I am going to structure complicated articles. This is very helpful later when I am tired. 

I also identify which tasks are "deep work" tasks--tasks that take a lot of hard thinking--and give myself 90 minutes to do them, as 90 minutes is apparently the maximum time you can really concentrate on an intellectual task. After 90 minutes of hard work, I take a break with some "shallow work", like reading emails or finding stories to write about or even research. Research is easy compared to writing pieces.

Deep work is by definition cognitively challenging, and I've had a lot of practise thanks to (GUESS!) frequent study of Polish. As I may have mentioned before, my memory has improved really a lot, thanks to hours of memorising Polish grammar, vocabulary and occasionally even poems and songs. Even my memory for numbers has improved. I still find writing "hard news" difficult, but I hope that eventually it will become second-nature. 

This week's challenge will be trying to keep up my work output after having returned to being B.A.'s primary caregiver. 

I am very grateful to the nurses and doctors at the hospital for all the tests they did and all the meals they brought B.A., but I am sorry they didn't provide him with very much physiotherapy or exercise. When I visited, I would take him for a short walk down the hallways, getting a little farther each day, but his mobility was clearly much worse than it was before he was admitted. I also read to him from a  children's chess book, as I am rather worried his poor shunted brain is being under stimulated. Learning to play chess will be good for both of us.

Meanwhile, the National Health Service is not the be-all and end-all of care. You really can't rely on doctors and nurses to do everything for your loved one in the UK: you have to do a lot yourself. You really do. Fortunately for "Central Belt" Scots over 65, many (if not all) local governments supply home nursing help. However, those under 65 seem to be out of luck. If you are chronically ill, under 65 and need help taking a bath, it's a good plan to be married to a relatively young and healthy person. 

Meanwhile,  the fund for Joe Baklinski, to which some of you generously donated, has topped the goal. His brother was hoping to raise $25,000 Canadian so that Joe, his wife and their eight children could see the winter out. (Joe's in construction, and in Canada that means you work hard all summer to make up for the lean winter.) Well, it was $26, 000 a few days ago, and I see that now that the goal is $30,000, there's $29, 096. That's very awesome, and I predict a very happy Christmas for all the kids.

B.A. was very pleased and edified that people donated to Joe's fund because he (B.A.) was sick. He said it meant that something good had come out of his illness. Fortunately for us, his employer has a very generous sick-leave provision, so we have a way to go before we have to start worrying about happy Christmases, etc. 

In other news, I saw Cardinal Burke yesterday. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to speak to him, but tomorrow I will write all about the Mass he celebrated in Glasgow.