Silence Is Golden

Result! A whole 4 hours sleep. It felt like heaven and though I could have done with some more, I was happy to settle for that. I was even more pleased when the now rather unhappy staff nurse returned to apologise for the night before. Yes, I was right, the student had fabricated the entire thing and was going to get a bollocking when she arrived for her next shift. The day was getting better and better. All I needed now was a free pass to get home and the day would be complete.

After what felt like hours, and was in fact, hours, the docs made their way round again and I sucked in a deep breath and waited to hear the magic words ‘you can go home’. You can probably imagine my disappointment when they said that they wanted to do more bloody tests. I mean, you can only give blood so many times, right? Still, I was a good girl and sat patiently while the nurse attached the sticky pads and leads of a wireless heart monitor to my chest. At least this ward was a little quieter. I would cope, that’s all.

Not even 30 minutes later the ward sister appeared and announced that I was moving...again. It seems hospital beds are like buses. You can’t get one for love nor money, then two come along at once. This next move was to the Coronary Care Unit, and I’ll be honest, the name alone scared me a little. I’m only 32, why the hell did I need to be on a tiny ward with 8 beds and a permanent crash team on standby? Was I really that ill? And if I was, why the hell was no one telling me anything?

So yet again, I packed my belongings (which were rapidly starting to look like I’d moved in permanently) ,dumped everything onto the bed and waited for Igor to arrive to move me. You know I feel a bit mean calling the porter ‘Igor’ cos it isn’t his name, but he honestly walks and talks just like a mad scientist’s sidekick from an old 50’s horror film. He didn’t take long, lurching into the bay with his lop sided gate and we were off again.

The CCU was as scary as the name had sounded, at least to begin with. As I said, it only had 8 beds, and everything was hushed for the afternoon quiet time (I kid you not). Lights were off, visitors had been chased away and the blinds were down. They took their nursing seriously on that ward. The people here were much more ill than those I’d seen previously and most of them were waiting for an operation at an Oxford hospital.

The ward was divided into two bays of four beds, with the most ill patients in the right hand bay, and us not quite so ill peeps on the left. Well...I say not so ill, but the lady nearest the nurse’s station was dying, and had an endless stream of weeping family slipping in and out of her curtained off area. Facing her was a gentleman who was clearly very ill, and constantly wearing an oxygen mask, though he was clearly trying hard to keep optimistic. He had a wee portable dvd player and was watching endless episodes of Sherlock Holmes at full volume.

The woman in the last bed turned out to be my life saver. She was 36 and a routine angioplasty had discovered a 99% blocked artery in heart and she was waiting to go to Oxford to have a stent placed in it. Other than that, she felt perfectly healthy, and like me was climbing the walls.

They wheeled me to my place and I realised there was a monitor screen by the bed. I could see exactly what my heart was up to at all times. Now I don’t know about you, but I think that makes things even scarier. Every time I moved my pulse would race off and the machine would start yelling at me.

As a teacher, I had taught enough basic science that I knew what a resting heart rate should be. I even knew that it would get a bit faster as I moved about, however, I sure as hell knew it shouldn’t race to 160+ just because I straightened out my blanket, or turned over in bed! Nope, this wee machine was too much info, and hell on any attempts to sleep, as the minute you rolled over in bed (and your pulse raced off again) it set off its siren wail to the nurse’s station, and you waited patiently for the nurse to appear to reset the machine. Funnily enough, yet again, sleep eluded me.