Dopey, Mopey and Muddley

I had my minor operation last Thursday – a hysteroscopy (=camera up fanny) and biopsy.  Fun – not.  Apparently everything looked good, normal and healthy inside – so the biopsy result will take about two months to process because there was no need to prioritise it.  I’m not complaining – I’m very glad that it wasn’t a case of “Oh my God, are you seeing what I’m seeing?  That looks like a textbook malign heebeegeeby - quick, get this woman’s samples to the lab, stat!”  But a two month wait for confirmation of the visual all-clear is a bit trying.  And in the meantime I have to get over having had a general anaesthetic.

I’m one of those people who react badly to anaesthesia.  I don’t mean seriously medically badly – I don’t get hypoxic or have blackouts or develop DVT, thank goodness.  I just need to sleep for several days, and when I am awake I am dazed and monosyllabic, and am baffled by simple tasks (like multiplication).  For the first couple of days, even trying to have a coherent conversation defeats me.  When I came back to work yesterday I still felt as though my brain were full of feathers; thinking through problems and sorting out work priorities was ghastly. If I had not known how very under par I was, it would have been terrifying.  I’m in a new job, and yesterday it looked as though I would never have a hope of getting my head around it.  Today I am a bit better.  I only feel like a convalescent, not a dementia victim, and consequently the job looks manageable again.

A few years ago I elected to have my wisdom teeth out under sedation rather than have an anaesthetic.  It’s a pretty scary procedure – I had no idea how much crashing around, wrenching and thumping at the patient’s face would be involved (no wonder one is bruised to bejayzus afterwards) – but compared to the semi-comatose state I’m in now, anything is preferable. 

Does anyone else have this problem?  Websites like NHS Direct and BUPA barely give it a mention.  Yet I can’t believe I’m that unusual.  To sum up, at present I am:

Sleepy - all the time

Depressed and mope-ish

Muddle-headed and easily confused

Weepy

And my sense of balance is shot to pieces.

Does that catalogue of symptoms ring any bells with anyone? 

I cannot wait to feel normal again.  We just don’t think about what a blessing normality is, until suddenly it is taken away!

Hectic week...

It's been a hectic few days as we prepare for the big shake-up and switch-around as people move to new desks/offices/buildings...  Work reshuffles are a lot of hassle. 

To add to it all, I've been trying to get a hospital appointment rescheduled, and have been unable to get through to the hospital by telephone or email.  Very frustrating.  In the end, rather than lose the appointment & get bumped and blacklisted as a DNA ("did not attend"), I have had to change all my other plans, cancel a long weekend off, and make arrangements to go in for my day surgery tomorrow.  Luckily my lovely bonkers ex-flat-mate Kez is free tomorrow and can collect me afterwards and take me home - according to the info they send with the appointment letter, the hospital won't carry out the procedure if I don't have someone to meet me afterwards.  The possibility that not everyone can produce someone who can just drop everything and schlep out to Fulham doesn't appear to come into their planning.  But it will be lovely to see K again as we haven't met up for several months; and we can go home to chew the fat and put the world to rights over tea and chocolate biscuits if I am compos mentis enough...

Bitter cold still, and on Saturday night and Sunday last weekend we had snow in London.  It's almost all melted now, but was very messily dramatic for a few days. The snowdrops at work and in my own garden have hung on boldly throughout, though.

Not looking forward to tomorrow.  I don't enjoy going under a general anaesthetic.  Obviously the alternative would be far worse - but I always feel really dopey afterwards. 

It's over

I went to Charing Cross Hospital for Fracture clinic again this morning. I was all braced for another marathon of waiting (all my previous appointments have taken about three and a half hours). I had a novel, a notebook and pen, biscuits and a bottle of water. But I was in and out in less than an hour - and I have been discharged. I am, officially, no longer in need of any medical supervision for my wrist.

I'll have a piece of metal in my arm for the rest of my life, but it isn't hurting me, and it only sometimes triggers security scanning machines. But according to Mr Thomas, the consultant orthopaedic surgeon who saw me, I have made a very good recovery from a nasty little injury. "Well done," he said, and he actually beamed at me. I fear this means a lot of his patients do not make good recoveries. Maybe they don't drive themselves nuts with boredom doing the exercises...

I walked out of there with a huge grin on my face; I was smiling so wide that about seven people smiled back at me between the hospital and Hammersmith Broadway (note to self; do this more often - it would appear it's a really simple way to spread a little happiness!).

I'm at about 85% normal mobility now, and Mr Thomas, going by the low-tech measuring system called "squeeze my finger, please", thinks I'm at about 90% of normal strength.

Hurrah! The endless exercises, the physiotherapy sessions and Wrist Boot Camp and all the pain and worry (& grumbling) have paid off!

Thank you to all my friends and neighbours, and everyone out there, for all your support while I moaned and groaned my way through this long uphill slog of recovery!

Have a good weekend.

Things you learn when you break your right wrist...

This, as most of you will notice, is not me. I've never been to a ski resort in my life...

However...

It’s amazing what you can do one-handed. But -

Loo rolls with faulty perforations are really irritating.

Loo roll dispensers on the right-hand side of the loo are really irritating.

People who don’t look where they are going and bash into your plastered-up and be-slinged arm are really irritating. Dogs and small children, ie mobile trip hazards, likewise, though they at least have the excuse of ignorant innocence.

Washing up is really irritating – even more so than usual, that is.

My elderly glasses are really uncomfortable, at least they are after a fortnight.

Boiled rice and (ready-chopped) vegetables with sauce (out of a bottle) and (ready-grated) cheese on top is nicer than it sounds, but it gets monotonous, and creates more washing up (see above) than a vegetarian cook-chill ready meal.

Tesco vegetarian cook-chill ready meals are vile. Sainsbury’s vegetarian cook-chill ready meals are okay, but bland, and give me gas (anyone care to identify the additive responsible?). M+S vegetarian cook-chill ready meals are okay but tend to include pastry – difficult to deal-with one-handed. Waitrose vegetarian cook-chill ready meals are excellent but horribly expensive.

It’s a good thing I love toast. Sadly at present it has to be toast with small irregularly-spaced blobs of butter or jam, as actually spreading anything is quite beyond me.

It’s hard to believe I am normally someone who tries to look reasonably well-turned-out. Initially I had precisely one bottom-half garment I could get into, a pair of 1992 vintage tracksuit legs I normally wear as gardening trousers, and precisely one wearable warm over-garment, a baggy knee length woolly I normally use as a bathrobe. However, I have managed, with a little expenditure, to get past the bag-lady look this gave me. I have purchased a pair of navy blue perma-press polyester elastic-waisted trousers, a gents button-fronted cardigan, and an alice band. With my glasses perched on my nose, my shirt-tails untucked, my long hair floating loose like a frizzy chestnut halo, no bra (& enough bosom for this to be noticeable), and terribly sensible flat shoes, plus the perma-press-and-cardi combo, I now look like a comedy lesbian version of the classic absent-minded professor. I hope this is acceptable in the office – thank the gods it’s an office at Kew and not somewhere with, like, a dress code or something.

On Friday I had an appointment at the fracture clinic for a follow-up x-ray, which was apparently so good that they promptly (well, pretty slowly, actually – they were, pun absolutely intended, snowed under) whipped my plaster off and took out my stitches, and then put another plaster cast on. This latest one is mine till late January. My bare, slightly swollen and misshapen right forearm, with a puckered, bloodstained four-inch incision down the soft wrist side, was an extraordinary and curiously tragic sight to my eyes, but the consultant declared it looked “splendid” and told me to use my fingers as much as possible and to make an appointment at Occupational Therapy for my first physio session on Wednesday.

I would have liked to have seen the x-ray, but everyone was so busy, that first wildly icy morning of the Great Cold Snap, that I felt I had no right to take up their time. Now that I am over the worst I am finding this whole business weirdly interesting. I really wanted to see my own arm again, and examined it with compassionate fascination; sometime I’d love to see inside it, with the plate + screws added…