A brief holiday

I’ve spent the last five nights being waited on hand and foot in an establishment that’s almost as good as a hotel - except for the menu and wine list.  I refer of course to the Tunbridge Wells Hospital, where I’ve had a repair done to a hernia that resulted from my cancer job almost exactly two years ago.  I was in the care of the same surgeon as last time, and a lot of the care staff were also the same as last time: it was like a reunion with old friends.

I had a nice room looking east across the Weald towards the North Downs.  It’s a pity it was right next to the sometimes raucous nurses’ station, but at least that meant that, if I had to ring the call bell, someone was there quickly.  Of course, the catering was pretty institutional and bland, but I wasn’t using a lot of energy, so better fare would have been wasted.  The surgeon is happy with the results, and a modest extra benefit was that he had seen the encouraging results of a CT scan I had a week before.

Of course, I had drains for a few days, which made trips to the loo a bit complicated.  But in the early days I couldn’t get out of bed anyway.  Mercifully, I didn’t need a catheter or an epidural, so the external plumbing was limited.  Another mercy is that I don’t need anti-coagulants, so am spared the self administered jabs I had to do for weeks after the last do.  Even better, I didn’t have to hang around in the discharge lounge until the pharmacy got its arse into gear.  That took over three hours last time, and was the worst part of the whole experience.

So I was discharged straight from the ward as soon as my discharge letter came through, and Martyn was on hand to see to my case: I have to avoid heavy lifting for six weeks.  Getting up from bed and from low chairs is still pretty painful, though that’s starting to ease now.  Of course it doesn’t help that I’ve caught a cold - and there’s only one place I could have got it!  Coughing and sneezing are no fun!  

But I have in general nothing but praise for the hospital and its staff, a clear majority of whom are immigrants, all of them unfailingly competent and caring.  The threat from the so-called Reform party that they would end indefinite leave to remain would wreck the NHS, which wouldn’t need a lot of wrecking these days.