Road to recovery [Surrogate Blip by Carl]

Care and attention continued in the High Dependency Unit until some time this afternoon, with more breathing exercises, more moving between bed and chair (at one stage I felt abandoned just a little bit in the chair). The whole fine-tuned business of domino-effect shwitch-overs of patients from one type of bed and one type of care to another went on all round me, and we went through a bit of a traffic jam towards the end of my time there as we waited for the traffic lights to change.

The gurney journey took me along familiar territory and ended in the ward room beside the one I'd begin my Mater journey in just eight days before. This room is a kind of half-way-house between high-dependency and general-wardness, with main difference being that all the patients are connected up for constant monitoring. I got off on a bit of a wrong foot, unable to get comfortable in the bed and finding the hospital pillows even more lumpy than they'd seemed before. Perhaps there was an element of unease lingering in the background, with my being subliminally aware that I would be in Berlin on a nice city break if things had gone according to the original plan. Carl had gone ahead with the off-work time he'd booked for Berlin anyway, and had devoted yet more time to his temporary profession as surrogate blipper. Today's shots came from around Dún Laoghaire, and included some crackers. Once again it wasn't easy to make a final choice, but this one won out after a bit of cam reflection at upload time.

To finish this entry, the following is a quote from my Hospital Journal as written at the time: The nurses annoyed me more than a bit because of their loud chit-chat and tendency always to drop things rather than place them back nice and quietly. The fab nurse who did my body scrub on Wednesday warned me that she'd be taking blood and giving me a pain killer drip during the night, and she wasn't joking, since I remember being disturbed at 2.00 am and 6.00.