I’ve been sick all November. And when I say sick, I mean puking, wailing, bed-ridden sick, not “a little bit of a sniffle”. I even spent five days in hospital, and when I got out my friends and family noted that I was too sick to look after myself and packed me back to my parents.
Despite being bedridden for the entirety of the month, it’s still not entirely clear what’s wrong with me. In fact, my current medical state seems to be a continuation of things that went a bit screwy earlier in the year. I won’t go into it – it’s variously disgusting – but the start of November saw me needing some intense medical care.
I went to the doctors several times before being admitted to hospital. It’s not easy these days – I walked into A&E to be told I should go to my GP, but twelve hours later I was lying in a hospital bed. Not because of the GP either; I got to see a nurse at my local practice who told me I was dehydrated and gave me a glass of water. It’s true, I was dehydrated – but it was from sleeping 20 hours a day, uncontrollably, while my body tried it’s best to heal itself from whatever internal stuff was going on.
Medical crapness didn’t stop at the hospital door either. Once in hospital, I surprised a number of doctors by arguing and using logic (the line “it’s not a virus, because I’ve had it since at least June” caused a number of junior doctors to look surprised). I mistrust the medical profession about as much as I mistrust anybody who doesn’t want to continually hand me coffee, and so the various xrays, endoscopies, and insertion of needles was endured with suspicion.
This wasn’t helped by the fact that the first night I spent in hospital, I had a drip mis-inserted into my arm. Thankfully, saline solution is completely harmless, and people more kinky than me use it to inflate various… body parts. I just ended up with a bicep that looked like a kidney bean, but I was too generally unwell to really care.
I’m told that my recovery is going to take a long time, and since getting out of hospital I can count the number of times I’ve been outside on one hand. Pretty much everything I was doing is on hold, and I’m finding it difficult to keep up with a lot of things, including online social networks. Recovery is happening though, it’s just slow, so you’ll excuse me if I crawl back under the blankets now.
See you in the new year.
