Reincarcerated

I wish the medical team would stop doing this to me. This time Mr Second-in-Command said he thinks I should arrange for somebody to move in with me so that I can leave here. I said I couldn't sort out something like that at the drop of a hat, to which he said that at this stage I'd actually done my convalescence here, and the last thing they'd want would be for me to catch an infection.

What he said set me into a whirl, and flummoxed me quite a bit. I mean to say, from the very beginning, way back when I first got detained in Beaumont, the importance of convalescence has been stressed, and I'd been advised over and over again to keep on mentioning my living-alone circumstances. I think it's only natural that I forgot to mention the dreadful state of my leg while the team were here, but, mentioned or not, it's still causing me problems. I managed to nab a physiotherapist at some stage during the afternoon and she told me the state of my leg isn't unusual and told me to keep on walking and to do ankle- and calf-stratching exercises. She also said that if the other patients rolled up their pyjama legs I'd probably see that their legs were equally swollen.

So all in all I'm a bit down again today, possibly not just because of all this but also because of the lack of transfer to convalescence and the fact that I'm back stuck in here again after my time out yesterday and the day before. The blip may not look like it, but it's actually a view of the lower slopes of Mount Everest, by which I mean that these are the stairs where we bypass recoverers are brought to do our climb-the-steps exercises. It's a nice staircase in its own way, but getting back up eighteen of these steps is a surprisingly severe challenge -- and I guess I can be reasonably pleased of the fact that I somehow managed to do that twice today.

There was a bit of a false alarm from one of the nurses during the afternoon when she rushed in to ask me how long I planned to stay in convalescence. She said 'Clontarf may have a bed available for a week' and rushed off again. There was no further word about that until around the time the evening meal arrived, at which stage things had changed and I was told once again that 'there might be a bed available tomorrow'.