Hospitals # 2

Some more musin's on 'ospitals. Any guesses what that thing above is? Well, after my op, through a fog of anaesthetic, painkillers, sugary tea and digestives, I asked if I could go to the toilet. The nurse promptly handed me one of these things, whipped the curtains around my bed, and told me to "buzz when I'm done".

Now, I'm afraid to say I get stagefright at the best of times, but it's a weakness I've been working on, much like a cricketer who has been ruthlessly exposed outside off-stump, and has gone back to work on his foot movement with an elite batting coach. However, no amount of work or practise in the nets could have prepared me for this. I blurted out my first concern before the nurse had a chance to leave: "How am I meant to work this?" She gave me a shrug and a half-smile as if to say, "You'll work it out, you BIG GIRL."

I can hear you laughing, but it really wasn't easy. I had no feeling in my left leg, which in any case had a dirty great tube filled with blood coming out of it. I had a drip in my left arm, and was hooked up to a computer monitoring blood pressure, oxygen in the blood, and how badly I needed a wee (possibly). The ward was full of people oblivious to my torment, chatting, coughing, groaning and generally putting me right off the task in, ahem, hand. And one nurse after another kept poking their head through the curtains, "Are you done yet?" No, I'm FLIPPIN WELL NOT DONE YET. CAN'T YOU SEE THIS IS AGONY?

It was near impossible, and took me all of two hours to get the merest dribble out into the cardboard tube-thingy, which I promptly forgot about and tipped on to my leg. I varied my methods of attack - under the covers, over the covers, left side, right side, good leg on the floor... I even tried to get my bad leg down, and immediately remembered that it was completely numb from the upper thigh down, and had thus turned into a two-tonne elephantine limb which was impossible to shift.

Every time I approached the promised land, a nurse, visitor - even Yr Chairman - would appear and leave me exasperated. I was concentrating so hard sweat was pouring down my face. The nurses were laughing at me. Something had to be done. I decided on a change of attack - ignore it.

So I picked up The Guardian sport section, read some nonsense about 'Cricket Australia' (a side issue: anyone else resent the reversal of normal English when it comes to naming sporting bodies, Cricket Australia, Team GB etc - what's wrong with 'Australian Cricket'?) objecting to Cricinfo calling Justin Langer a 'brown-nosed gnome' (Craig would've been proud of that one), and lo! It all came gushing forth. A veritable torrent. The relief was unconfined.

I buzzed for the nurse and beamed at her as I handed over my pot of warm piss. Happy days! I even asked for another tube, and was slightly concerned later that night when I had a full conversation with a nurse whilst I was weeing into my pot under the covers. An odd sensation, I can tell you. By morning time I had three warm pots to hand over, and all was well with the world once more.

The moral of the story? There's nothing like Australians taking themselves too seriously to help you (take the) piss.

Operations

Oh, I'm sorry, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. I've not even told you why I'm writing this yet. I've just had an operation on my knee, which I injured playing for the mighty Union Street FC back in March 2006. If you're interested in these things, I ruptured the ACL in my left knee winning a header against some chopsy-larrakin called Ramsey, and it took me all of 8 months to get an operation on the NHS.

The operation is really clever (or just plain horrific, depending on how squeamish you feel about these things). Your ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is a ligament right in the middle of your knee that connects your tibia to your femur (look at me getting all technical) and stops your leg from shooting off in front of you. I ruptured that, which means that it isn't there any more (in the past 6 months I've learned the oh-so-important difference between a rupture and a tear).

You can play sport without an ACL - apparently my all-time Swindon Town hero, former Scotland midfielder and current Notts Forest manager Colin Calderwood kept playing after he ruptured it. It's just a question of building up the muscles around your knee (I imagine Colin had lovely thighs). But my consultant told me that if I want to play football - which is just about the nastiest thing you can do to your knees (just ask Martin Scarfe) - then an operation was the only way to go. Maybe he didn't like my thighs.

The ACL can't repair itself, so they (they being the clever doctors) need to graft (tear off) a bit of ligament from somewhere else. Sounds fun, huh? They could take a bit from the ligament that attaches your patella (knee cap) to your leg. Mmmm, nice. Or they could take a bit of your hamstring (there's plenty to spare apparently) - which was what they did with me.

So, the operation goes a little something like this: drug the patient til his eyes pop and make some quite neat little holes in the front of his leg. Somehow take a strip of his hamstring (apparently they test its strength mid-op on a ligament-strength-testing machine - images of giggling surgeons pinging ligaments around the operating theatre abound) and screw it into place using dissolvable screws (hopefully they're not made of sugar, or I'm farked). Stitch patient up, stick a worryingly-large tube in his thigh to drain the blood from the knee, and laugh when patient wakes up from his anaesthetic - babbling like a drunkard to everyone in the ward.

Ta-da!

Hospitals # 1

OK, so it's a couple of days since my operation on my knee, time for some reflections on hospitals, before I get into all that physiotherapy-recuperation nonsense.

Nurses are nice, aren't they? I mean, really nice, and not in a "NURSE!" sexual way, either. They put up with a lot of, err, crap (literally). They hand out drugs like there's no tomorrow, they tuck you in at night, they give you a special cardboard pot to piss in (and then take it away again, piss-filled - more of which later), and they make you tea whenever you want it. I LOVE NURSES!

What's more, they have to bow down to the fat cat doctors when they swan up, late as ever. It's interesting observing the whole colour-coded hospital food-chain - at the hospital I was at, this went something like: porters at the bottom, with their black jumpers, grey school-trousers and sensible shoes. Then you've got the nurses in blue t-shirts and trousers, the radiographers in rather fetching maroon, physiotherapists in white, anaesthetists with their green hats and then the consultants, who get to wear whatever they like - usually an awful suit from their public school days, complete with patches and stripy tie.

Interesting also that everyone bar the doctors and the porters is female. OK, so maybe that isn't interesting, but there was definitely a gender divide going on, and a bit of a class thing too - all the consultants were terribly posh, talked about rugger and seem to swan about as if they owned the place, patients included. And the friendly nurses were from all over the world - even Wales. I love that multicultural shit, man.

Hospitals: they're like a microcosm of society, aren't they?