At home, at last

Posted in: Injury Time

On the fourth week anniversary of being ambulanced into St Thomas' A&E I was ambulanced out at a more leisurely pace taking in the delights of Clapham's Saturday afternoon traffic. The discharge (as they term it) was somewhat involved and in some cases quite irritating and, disappointly, costly but the joy of being at home at last far outweighs those niggles.

Yay, back home!

Urban Wheeled Exploration

Earlier on Saturday Nik, Eva and I "escaped" from the hospital and went to see Urban Freeflow at Trafalgar Sq, the UK free-running group jumping around Nelson's Column and a sparse but workable obstacle of four fences joined in a square. I was super keen for this but as it turned out the music was so low energy it didn't raise the perception of what basically looked like the guys goofing about in a chilled training session. That said, there were some superb jumps from the lions, and a few neat "precisions" and spins off the railings round the column. I was gratified to see that none of the freerunners were attempting jumps remotely close to the one that shattered my heels on Friday 13th...

Wheel life

Pushing myself in the wheelchair from St Thomas' to Trafalgar Sq, a 1.4km / just under a mile journey, was quite some effort; Nik had to help on several occasions. Partly lack of skill and experience with a wheelchair, partly the distance, partly the lack of really any aerobic activity for a month, partly my body still undergoing a heavy healing process, the whole trip was pretty tiring. It was also really exciting - to be in the "real world" unmediated by beeping equipment and uniformed nursing staff. It's also quite odd to be at waist height in a crowd. There are benefits to this though...

Back at the hospital I was flagging hard and nearly fell asleep by my bed in the chair as my stuff was packed into green hospital-issued patient sacks. While I was away a guy I'd seen a few times hobbling about had moved into my bay. From the department of It Could Be Worse, he had more-or-less out of the blue come down with septic arthritis, an appalling, infectious, suddenly-occurring condition where the severe pain it causes is symptomatic of bacteria eating away the body's joints. He'd been rendered immobile at home in agony for two days until neighbours found him and he was swept to hospital, and undergone an operation every two days for a ten days or so. When we met he'd been in hospital for three months, contracted a mild form of MRSA, and could barely walk. I think his prognosis was somewhere between "won't die" and "reasonable eventual recovery with arthritis". Perspective check.

[Continued tomorrow...]

Posted by Paul Makepeace at June 12, 2005 23:00 | TrackBack