h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Right. Apologies for the huge gap in my Journals. Last Monday I was admitted to hospital on a few hours notice, and I barely managed to cancel all my appointments, taxis etc. before I had to wait for the Ambulance, so I didn't get round to paoting a warning of my absence.

I was in until late Friday. The actual "stuff" that they couldn't have done with me at home came down to twenty minutes on a drug pump and two minutes in a CT scanner.

I was admitted to the "infectious diseases" ward. Apparently, I later discovered, that was down to a doctor's bad handwriting. They had written on the front of my notes that my feet were "infected" and the admitting doctor had misread this as my feet being "infectious".

The stay improved late Wednesday, when I discovered that you *could* get in the ward, you just had to insist on it. Because I was flagged as a kidney patient, they only ever offered tea or milk... So, the two days of killer caffeine withdrawl headache wasn't actually necessary.

They quickly decided to pump the intravenous antibiotics into my dialysis machine rather than directly into my arm. This meant that I would get it on my normal dialysis days and thus the hospital stay wasn't really necessary. But they still kept me in till the Friday.

And the thing that was most irritating about it was the factt hey wouldn't trust me to take my own medication. It was kept in a locked steel box, and I was only allowed to take it on *their* schedule, which in genmeral was completely wrong for me. For example, I have a number of diuretic ("water") tablets that I take in the morning. I take three before breakfast, and three more about two hours later. This has been carefully calculated so I don't find myself getting up in the night to pee.

But they only allowed me to access the first three about an hour after breakfast, and the second lot about an hour and a half late just after lunch. And thay claim this system is there to make sure "I take my tablets on time".

And their lists of my meds were months out of date. One particular irritance was that, for the first two days, they wouldn't stop offering me "Lactrolose" three times a day, a mild laxative that I had used for three days four months previously, and that had somehow found its way onto my "Repeat Prescriptions" list and become stuck there despite many requests to remove it. I actually took about four tablespoons of the stuff, and as a result of that they've sent me over a litre of it. And every doctor and nurse is convinced I'm still using it.

Oh, and do you know those wristbands they stick on you, with your name and the ward you're from? At about 11:30PM on Thursday I got into a huge argument with a porter who had the wrong name for me and was insistent that he was going to take me back from dialysis to ward 108, despite the fact that all my stuff was in ward 111. I showed him my armband... and it turned out they had forgotten to print my ward number on it. All it confirmed was that the name he had scrawled on a post-it wasn't mine. *Nearly*, but not quite...

All in all it was an incredibly stressful week. I couldn't even relax and listen to Radio 4, as any time I closed the door to hear the radio and closed my eyes someone would come crashing in shouting about "what a sunny day it was" or similar, oblivious to the fact the radio was on. They thought they were "jollying me up", when in fact they were forcing me into a deeper depression. I really *hate* hospital.

Yesterday, I was home, and it was great, until just after 11am when I had to go back to the hospital for dialysis. :'-) I went downstairs ten minutes early with the plan of buzzing my neighbour and making contact, with a view to retrieving the parcel that had been left with them, but when I got downstairs I found the ambulance was already waiting for me.

Dialyis went without incident.

The trip back wasn't as fast. The drivers apologised for the fact that, although I lived second-closest to the hospital, I was going to be the last one to get home. I said "I don't mind, as long as you stop on the way and grab me a chip supper" - and they did!

So, that's everything from last week to last night. Hopefully, I'll be able to do daily Journals again now. I won't have a day to myself for at least three weeks - pretty much every day that I'm not on dialysis I'm going to have the District Gnurses coming round to "dress" my feet, and the only exception will be the days I have to go in to the Podiatry department to have them assessed. But, I'm told the antibiotics do seem to be having a positive effect, so I'll live with it and we'll see if we can save the feet.

I watched the first series of "Silicon Valley" in the dialysis ward, and last night I watched "Star Wasr Episode II: The Clone Wars".