Corridor encounter

I was feeling just a bit sorry for myself for most of the day. The lower leg from which the bypass vein was taken was really sore, numb in large part, and badly swollen. It had taken until the previous afternoon for anyone to advise me to keep the leg elevated, even though at that stage it was over a week since surgery. Such a simple tip, but why wasn't it passed on earlier? Tonight's night nurse really sorted things out by giving me an extra couple of still-folded blankets to support it on, but I really felt hard done by that it had taken so long to get to this stage. One of the members of the medical team had earlier told me that I should feel lucky that thats all that was wrong with me after such major surgery! The second-in-command to the surgeon asked one of the minions if I'd had a scan done and was told it had been asked for. This turned out to be a deep-vein thrombosis ultrasound. It was late evening by the time I had this done, and the operator assured me that things were clear in that department, that all was normal, and that there was definitely no sign of a clot. All well and good, but still...

The day had got off to a wretched start in a totally different department also. Quoting verbatim from my Hospital Journal once again (an obvious opportunity for the second part of the proposed ongoing Guide series -- in this case A Behavioural Guide for Cleaning Staff -- but I haven't got my act together yet to write this):

8.30 am. I just had a run-in (utterly ineffective) with the Cleaning Lady from Hell. She was going around doing her usual picking up and pushing around and all that, all the time sidling up on the window which she makes such an ostentatious point of throwing open every day and then immediately walking away from the resulting gale which rushes into the room. I'd earlier heard one of the nurses mention that it had rained. and it certainly isn't bright and sunny out there. But still she reached for the cord and did her 'Oh it's hot; we need some fresh air in here' routine. Rater than sit and bear it, this time I actually said something (along the lines of 'Oh please, no' or something like that). She was having none of it: 'You must have fresh air in the ward. Out with the old air; in with the new.' 'That's all very fine for you,' I said. 'You don't have to sit here all day.' 'Sure, can't you put on your dressing gown', was her response!

That out of the way and her authority neatly intact, she then went on to press home her advantage banging something into my bare foot which I was waiting to elevate again onto the bed beside me. 'Who's mobile?', says she. 'I need to know so they can move out of the way while I'm doing the cleaning. Anyway, I've always said these wards are too small.' Talk about misplaced priorities!

Obviously the blip has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this, and is just something I happened to spot going on during a short walk which I forced myself into taking (in that department too, nobody bothered telling me if it was better for my leg to continue to walk on it, or if I should give it a rest instead. All in all, the leg situation makes me feel that I've regressed rather than improved in the past three days or so, which is just a bit distressing.