Monthly Archives: December 2002

The time

The thing about hospital is the time, and the time is measured in weather. I’m in a tower and the whole vista of the city is spread out beyond the blinds in horizontal stripes. Rain comes and goes, patterns on the glass. Mist comes and goes. Fog. Dark clouds and light clouds. Sheffield is always covered in fog. One day there’s sunshine for a full hour. Flocks of birds circle the roofs of buildings far below. Only crows venture this high, and mark a second with a silhouette across the white sky.

The fear

The thing about hospital is the fear. My first night in, I finally start drifting to sleep around two, but I don’t quite get there. Caffeine half-dreams. Every seven minutes, instead of dropping down into sleep, I drop out – jumping like a rabbit, then start drifting and dreaming again.

After two hours of drifting and jumping, I finally jump myself awake and lie with a pounding heart and shallow breathing – symptoms of a pulmonary embolism. Maybe the clot moved like a subway train through my veins and has shunted through my heart into the siding of my lungs.

Those symptoms are also symptoms of a panic attack. I recover.

The thing about hospital is the time. I lie awake for an hour and decide I’ll never sleep. The longest night of the year, but the midwinter is a mental one. The clock moves so slowly towards dawn. The sky turns streetlight orange, and then blue. I fall asleep and wake with a rabbit jump exactly an hour later. Six o’clock. The ward has already started buzzing.

Don’t cry wolf

There’s a constant background noise in the hospital. It’s like the hiss of cosmic radiation. Nurses chat in the corridor. Televisions in the other bed bays. An old woman who refuses to eat is told off. A trembling bird is too frail to move her table and cries. Confusion. What month is it? Today? Friday. How many fingers am I holding up? Today? Friday. Are you left or right handed? Yes. Monitors bleep. It’s always the machine, never the patient. The buzzers have stopped working again and chime off key and then stop, leaving a gap in the air between the squeal of a bed being lowered and the crash of a plate on the floor. Nurse! Nurse! Don’t cry wolf. What if you call too much and they never come?

The hospital

The thing about hospital is time. Anyone who’s been in hospital can tell you that. The other thing about being in hospital is fear.

About a month ago (or maybe two), I began to get some strange aches in my left foot, along the muscle in the middle. At the time my work shoes were a pair of flat backless mules that were slightly too large. I’m only a size 3, so it’s difficult to get shoes that are elegant or adult. Occasionally my foot would slip out of my shoes sideways when I walked to work. I thought I must have strained a muscle in my foot. The pains went off and on and would appear, last for a few days and then fade away.

I decided I had to get new shoes, I couldn’t go on like this, so once I’d been paid I went out and bought a pair of really comfortable heels from M&S. I was very pleased with them – I’d never been able to wear heels as the pairs I’d had previously never fitted properly and usually gave me blisters or tripped me up.

A couple of weeks after I started wearing them I strained my calf muscle. I was disappointed. Another failed pair of shoes! I assumed that I must have strained my calf falling off my heels. Occasionally they would get the better of me. I’ve had rather clumsy legs recently, probably a symptom of being on the pill.

I started wearing flats and taking things easy, walking slowly, and over the weekend, I rested up. My leg healed. Apart from a slight pain at the back of my knee, presumably tendon related, I felt fine.

Monday morning I put my heels back on. They were so comfortable I didn’t want to give them up. Wednesday I spent my lunch hour taking a twenty-minute walk to the nearby retail park. I overran my lunch hour and hurried on the way back to work, noticing the ache seemed to be coming back in my left leg.

The following morning I awoke in agony. My calf was solid and swollen. J. was due back from a business trip at around ten. I contemplated taking the day off work, but as I’d booked the Friday off as a holiday, I didn’t want to feel as though I was using my leg as an excuse to stay at home and see J., who had been away since Sunday night.

The trip to work was a real nightmare. My calf was frozen solid, my knee refused to bend, so I hobbled like a horror movie Frankenstein. Every step hurt, became an endurance to dread. I travel on the tram. There’s a two or three hundred metre walk to the building at the other end of the journey. It took me about ten minutes, stopping every few steps to massage some life back into my calf. My frustration boiled over, and I thumped and slapped it when massage wouldn’t work.