Hops, DON'T!!
I've got a friend who lives miles from me now, and every time she sends me a card, it's got a C-A-T on it!! And she keeps asking me if I like ginger ones best, or tabby ones...! One day I'll give in, and get another one...
Ami,
You asked about my 'near death' experience - not sure how close I really came, but here goes (this is long - be warned!):
I woke up on a Wednesday morning, and while my husband went downstairs to make some tea, I suddenly got an excruciating pain in my stomach. I just knew it was appendicitis, as I’d never felt a pain that sharp before. He heard me screaming, and came back upstairs. I just said ‘Do something!’, so he called an ambulance. It took about 10 minutes for the ambulance to arrive, but 45 minutes to get to the nearest hospital (we live in the country). When we got there, I was put on a trolley in the corridor, head to toe with other people (they’d run out of cubicles – this is the National Health Service, and it’s falling apart!), and left for FIVE HOURS! They said they couldn’t give me any painkillers, or water even, until a doctor had seen me. My husband kept asking when I’d be seen, but it was obvious there were other people who needed seeing to before me – the man next to me was in agony, and on his own, too, and I felt so sorry for him. At least I had my husband with me.
Eventually I got seen, and surprise surprise, they thought I had appendicitis! By now my stomach was quite swollen, so they put a drip in ‘so I wouldn’t get dehydrated’, and moved me by ambulance to another site, where I was put on the Assessment Ward. Another wait of five hours. We kept pointing out to any nurse that passed by, that the drip wasn’t working, and that my blood was backing up the tube, rather than the fluid going into me, but they just flicked the tube and said ‘that’ll be OK’.
The pain got so bad that by 7pm they gave me morphine. Then I had an interview with the surgeon. Not the best way round, really, was it?! I was talking rubbish, he seemed obsessed with the fact that he thought there might be a tiny chance I was pregnant (as I told him, my husband had a vasectomy 25 years ago, so that’s hardly likely!). When I went to have an Xray, I couldn’t remember my name, to sign the consent form. They said to just put an X, but I couldn’t remember what that was, so they had to hold their hand over mine to help me do it. What a state I was in!
I got onto a proper ward by 9pm. My husband stayed with me till 11.30pm. when he was chucked out, and told to go home, and that they’d operate during the night. He’d been really calm and so supportive all day, and had had nothing to eat (he gets IBS, so that’s not sensible for him), and he only told me afterwards that when he got out to the car park he’d left the lights on on the car and the battery was flat. He had to call out the AA to get the car going, and didn’t get home till 3am.
I went in to the operating theatre at midnight, and remember feeling really calm – most of the staff were great (except one nurse who was a bitch, and I hope she rots in hell). As I arrived there for the pre-med, the anaesthetist took one look at the drip in my arm and said ‘who on earth did that?’ When I said ‘Some nurse on their first day in Casualty’ she turned away and said to someone else 'That’s really dangerous.’
The next thing I remember is coming round, about 4am, back in the ward, and feeling a weird happy feeling. I started laughing (don’t know if that was the drugs!). I felt hot, but SO relieved. One of the male staff who was really nice got me a soluble Paracetamol painkiller, as he remembered that I can’t swallow tablets (leftover feeling from having anorexia, I think – I refuse to swallow stuff that I’m TOLD to).
In the morning, when the consultants did their rounds, the surgeon who’d operated on me went past and did a double take and said 'My God, you’re all pink! You were grey last night. We were so worried about you.’
It turns out (I didn’t realise this until I found the operation consent form later) that I’d signed to say I understood that there was only a 40% chance of me surviving the operation. But, as my husband said later, if I hadn’t had it, there was a 100% chance of me dying. Apparently, the whole of my abdominal cavity had been full of pus by the time they operated. Yeuch!!
Anyway, I hated being on the post-op ward (full of daft women who talked inane rubbish, the TV blaring out from 5.30 am till 11.30 at night) mixed sex toilets and showers, awful, inedible food…
I was so determined to get out, that I watched what you had to do so that I scored enough ‘points’: get out of bed on my own and sit in a chair, not on the bed, ‘exercise’ by walking up and down the corridor with my drip-stand (within hours of the operation), go to the toilet unaided, drink their disgusting over-chlorinated water, don’t go to sleep during the day, eat their yucky food…
By the second day, I managed to convince the consultant that I could go home (so, my mother was right… I AM a determined little cow!). They phoned my husband to tell him (he cried then, he told me later – isn’t that sweet?). I asked him to bring ‘smart’ clothes, as I wanted to go out dressed properly, so after getting dressed behind the cubicle curtains, when I came out the woman in the bed opposite said ‘My God, you look like a different person!’ I really felt like one, too. When I got home, I was in bed for a fortnight. My husband was brilliant – he made lovely food for me, read to me when I was too weak to even hold a book, worked out that he could wash my hair for me without me getting out of bed if I lay sideways with my head over the edge of the bed…
I had a really bad reaction to the antibiotics that I was sent home with, and that was almost worse than the appendicitis. The side effects meant that my breathing was erratic and laboured, I had hallucinations, and the nightmares were so scary I tried to stay awake rather than experience them every time I went to sleep (violent bombs going off in crowded areas like markets, with spirals of metal shot out in all directions, cutting people to bits, all with a ‘soundtrack’ of screaming. The worst nightmares I’ve ever had). He stayed with me through all that, appearing calm whenever he was with me. He kept my business, as well as his own, running smoothly while all this was going on (we each run mail order businesses from home).
Gradually I got stronger, until after a month I could stand upright for long enough to go shopping to the supermarket with him. Wow! The outside world! Around this time, I was ‘allowed’ to have baths again (once the dressing had come off). The first time I sat in the bath and saw the scar, it just hit me what had happened, and I had a panic attack. That wore off over the next couple of months.
But I had a lot of time to think, while I was in bed for those weeks. Why hadn’t I died? What was the point? I remember thinking that I wasn’t ready to die yet, that I planned to do so much, sooo…perhaps it was a kick up the backside to get me to get on with it, and stop wasting time…
In the April of 2006, we were invited to the wedding of my husband’s nephew. It was a big wedding, very posh, at an Anglican church in Birmingham. Because of contacts in the family (the groom’s mother is on the General Synod of the Church of England), the service was taken by the Bishop of York, John Sentamu. I had never heard of him, then. I didn’t believe in God, and I’d expected the day to be a bit dull, to be honest. And I always cry at weddings, too.
Anyway, after the first hymn (where I’d cried – the singing always gets to me), I was looking at the decorations around the walls, when I very clearly heard a voice, female, but definitely NOT mine, say ‘How many times do you have to get to this point, before you do something about it?’
It was then that I knew I had to start going to church, and sort out what I believe in. I spent the rest of 2006 searching the internet for spiritual paths that allow for a feminine face of God, and that’s why I chose the Unitarians, and we’ve been going since February this year.
All this has had a profound effect on me, as you can imagine. Me and my husband were close before all this, but we’re even closer, now.
I still don’t know quite what to make of the ‘voice in the church’, though. What do you think?
Janet
