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

Awww, you poor wee thing I do hope you get over this and your heart gets it's act together...if it doesn't do you know what your options are? I mean would a pacemaker work or are you looking at a heart transplant or what?

To be honest, I'm a bit scared of talking too much with the docters and finding out everything that's wrong with me

By the way, I heard that you've trained as a nurse...?

I only did half the training and I was specialising in Mental Health. I gave up because I had suffered from a fairly worrysome bout of depression where. Well to be more precise The uni were threatening to throw me out because of my depression so I walked.

I've also been on the recieving end of medical treatment and have been in the position of 'if [insert medical treatment here] doesn't happen in the next few days he's not going to make it'

So if you do want to talk about the medical stuff then I don't mind

i just don't know what's really going on with me and i'm too scared to find out. i'm plugged into all kinds of machines that go beep. i've got tubes going into my chest which I know are keeping me breathing tubes down my throat keeping my fed, needles in my arm for something-or other, sensor-things on my to make sure my brain is still functioning normally (haha - i don't think it ever has functioned 'normally'!), and metal things going through my chest which are apparently doing the heart-beating for me. I don't know how any of that works
At least they let me use the laptop still
I was worried they might not, but they've raised me slightly so I can see what I'm doing and strapped me back so I can't bump anything so I now have use of half one rm a day
It's really frustrating actually.

Ah, I was unconcious* when I was like that and, as I won't look at the photos of myself like that, don't quite know what it was like...plus I didn't need things keeping my heart beating, well it needed dealing with at one point but that was because something had started blocking one of the valves. It sounds like a pacemaker may do for you. It all depends on just what it is that's kaputski. They can fix most things nowadays, and, statisticaly, prayer and positive thinking actually do tend to improve the prognosis.




*for unconcious read heavily sedated after kicking a doctor in the vulnerables and giving a senior nurse bruises all over her legs.

It kicked in again on Friday noght
But now my lung's giving me horrid trouble...

I hope I'm not being rude in asking, but what happened to you...?

I was born with a liver which couldn't metabolise copper, which is found in such foods as , shellfish, liver and mushrooms. Because of this all the copper in all the food I'd ever eaten had floated around in my blood stream untill it deposited it's self either in my brain or my liver.

In 1996 my liver finally stopped working entirely and my brain went all screwey. That is I got encephalitis and then later suffered from a psychotic episode.

Oh heck! Now chocolate, liver and shellfish I can live without, but not mushrooms!
How come they only found out so late though? Mind you, I guess that's coz it's not something that people think of checking for... like apparently there's something messed up with my white blood cells that they've only found now when I turned out to have a horribly bad reaction to one lot of medication they gave me, but it's something I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't landed up here. (I'm still too scared to ask what is actually going on with that - I know my bloods have come back and the docter wants to talk to me about it, but I can only handle one thing at a time you know.)
So how did you manage to cope?

I went, temporarily, psychotic.

Well, before my liver transplant, which is what they did to fix the problem, I'd been on medication to get the copper out of my system. Then, after it became apparent that the medication wasn't going to work and they put me on the transplant list, they told me I may aswell eat chocolate, shellfish and mushrooms if I wanted to as they'd not found out about my illness quickly enough for the meds to work properly.

Now before I had become ill I never ate too much but after being banned from eating it I went nuts and binged on the stuff. I also decided to have a load of the big open cap mushrooms, fried in butter , as they are easily one of the nicest foods ever.

Any way all the copper eventually killed my liver completely and my mind went off and did it's own thing and pretty much ignored what was actually going on in the real world. Apparently I was living out the last TV program I watched before my mind wandered off.

I just tend to go all out crazy
And I gotta agree with your on the mushrooms! I like them raw too.
So were you quite young then when you had the transplant?

15.

Anyway 'tis good your heart's cooperating again..now you just need to get your lungs to play nicely.

Damn that's young!

My chest is just so damn sore! My one lung is completely out of it still and the other is messing around now. Started playing up last night

I'd offer to rub it better , but a) I doubt it'd help and b) I can't reach that far

A) it's on the inside
B) You'd need damn long arms!

Yes indeedy, and then they'd just get in the way the rest of the time.

They did the whole lung-inflation thing again last night. I'm getting sick of it.

You want to get a puncture repair kit and a bike pump, then you can fix it and inflate it yourself

the docters already come at me with bike pumps! I think they are going to use those big-ass electric ones next!

you have electric doctors with big asses?

Oh god that would be a nightmare!!!