tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

When I was discharged from hospital last Friday I had to face the greatest challenge of my short life, the front steps. To start with, I’d had a restless Thursday night. There was a mix up with my drugs: I thought that the morphine tablets had been ‘written up’ to be given to me regularly, but they were actually ‘patient request medication’ - only to be given to me if I was complaining or asked specifically for more pain killers. Seeing as I’d been moaning for about 3 days, I’d been getting them fairly regularly. However, when I stopped my moaning as a result of some Valium, the nurses thought my leg wasn’t as sore (I was high, how was it going to be sore?), so they didn’t give me any more morphine. To cut a long story short, when I woke up at 4am I was hurting bad. I’d gone 12 hours without any pain relief and was very sore and achey.

On Firday morning the Orthapedic Surgeon came past and poked my leg all over, “Does this hurt?” *poke*. etc… Bastard. He thought that all the pain might be coming from a blood clot in the damaged calf muscle, and ordered that I get an ultrasound. So, a few hours later it’s off to the Imaging Centre to have my leg twisted outwards so that the nurse can take the ultrasound thingo and press it into my leg every three centimetres from my groin to my ankle - right across the break and everything. There wasn’t any clot, it was just that I hadn’t had any pain killers. Another good waste of my time and strength and taxpayers money!

They took me and my bed back to the ward and I laid there in pain for about 2 minutes before the young phisyo graduate came to see me. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back. Now that we know you don’t have a blood clot, you can come and climb some steps”. They wanted me to prove that I’d be able to get up the steps at home, so that they could discharge me. I said I wasn’t really ready, that I’d just been through a painful ultrasound, and suggested that he come back later. He wasn’t having a bar of it. At that moment I decided that physios must have all been abused as young kids and now get their revenge by taking out their deep-seated trauma on others.

I climbed 7 stairs (1 more than required) and at 4:30pm they discharged me. We stocked up on drugs and I piled into the back of a taxi. I sat across the back seat and, for 25 minutes, winced as the driver sped around roundabouts and pulled up short at traffic lights. Understandably, by the time I got home to tame the steps there, I was tired: exhausted actually. Getting out of the Taxi and into the front courtyard thingo was hard enough. I had to sit down and have a rest after about 5 steps. Then I had to face the stairs. I caught my breath and started up. However, the steps here were slightly shorter and thinner than the ones I’d been practicing on at the hospital, so with each step I bumped my sore leg on the end of the stair and cried out in pain. I got to the top and sat down again in the kitchen (Mum and Zoe were running around moving the two chairs about into strategic rest stops - kinda like a driver-reviver program).

All of a sudden I was overcome by the need to pee. I yelled out that I was about to faint. Mum got some cold water onto a towel and draped it over my head. Then she got the salad bowl out and I could finally relieve myself (might like to keep this story in mind next time you come over for dinner). Dad held me against him so that I wouldn’t fall out of the chair if I fainted. After recovering, I managed to continue on to the bedroom where I proceeded to pass-out and sleep through most of the night, waking only to eat more morphine tablets.

So, overall, the taming of the front steps was the hardest single thing that I’ve ever had to do in my whole life (and I don’t say that lightly). This morning, though, I was able to go up and down in a matter of seconds. In your face front steps!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 31st, 2006 at 11:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.