While there's life...
It's my birthday on Wednesday. I shall be 61. I think I'm going to take a day off for it, so your next entry won't be till Friday. And I also think this would be a very good time to go into a bit more detail about exactly what happened to me in 2016, if you'll forgive the slight diversion from the usual kind of subject matter. There is in existence a photo of me lying unconscious in a hospital bed, hooked up to an alarming array of machines and looking about as white as the bedding; I seriously considered asking my sister for that so I could post it, but I don't want to traumatise anyone.
The first I knew that anything was wrong was when I unexpectedly fell flat on my face on Manchester Piccadilly station, pretty much exactly nine years ago. I knew I had neither slipped nor tripped; my balance had just gone. I shrugged it off and continued on my journey, but I had a few more falls at the other end, so when I got back to Sheffield I saw a GP, who told me I clearly had something amiss with my balance but it wasn't an inner ear infection. It got rapidly worse, to the point where I had to get a shopping trolley that doubled as a walking frame.
I have no idea - and nor do the doctors - whether what happened next is at all related; but about six weeks after my balance started going, I had some stomach trouble, saw another GP, and was diagnosed with gastro-enteritis. This, too, got rapidly worse, despite the pills I'd been prescribed, until one night I woke up in the small hours with a very clear sense that I ought to be in hospital. Right now.
I didn't realise it at the time, but already I wasn't quite thinking straight. I rang NHS 111 and they ended up getting me a taxi to see the emergency GP, who was based at the Northern General Hospital. If I'd been more on the ball, I'd have remembered to tell them all the symptoms and I'd have been blue-lighted up there in an ambulance; but I did know they'd admit me once they'd seen me, so I packed a bag. I forgot a few important things, but I did bring Wilfred. Well, he's important too!
To cut a long story short, they did. The next morning I woke up on a ward, and I do recall I managed to get some juice down; not sure if I could eat any breakfast. Then they wheeled me off for tests, and I was chatting quite happily with the nurses when I suddenly had the most awful pain on the left side of my abdomen. I was trying to tell them where it was and how bad it was...
...and then the next thing I knew, I had a doctor standing over me saying, "Ah. You've just had emergency life-saving surgery, and, by the way, you've now got a stoma."
OK. That must have been a semi-lucid interval. Not fully lucid, because I was so spaced out I just thought "oh... stoma? OK!" I knew I was getting better when that became "stoma?!" and, later still, "aaargh - stoma!". But I spent most of the next few weeks either hallucinating, seriously paranoid, or both.
It took me quite a while to piece together what had happened. I'd had rather poorly controlled reflux. That had led to a duodenal ulcer, which had burst; and that in turn had led to acute bowel ischaemia, in two places, one in my ileum and one in my colon. (For the non-medical, I literally had two sections of gut die on me.) And that resulted in full-body sepsis. My chance of survival, even with surgery, had been in single figures; and if I hadn't had that extraordinary feeling that I needed to be in hospital, I wouldn't be here to tell the tale. And it was indeed extraordinary. I was ill, true, but I'd felt a lot worse in my time.
Once I was back on this planet, at least most of the time, I got to meet Squirty Sidney the Ill-Tempered Ileostomy. He started as he meant to go on; one of the first things he did that I was aware of was to blow all over the most expensive scanner in the hospital, and it didn't get any better. Yes, he'd saved my life, but he was determined to exact a penalty for it in the form of as much inconvenience as he could cause... which was plenty! Not only did he blow frequently, often in the middle of the night and sometimes more than once in a day, but he caused all kinds of other havoc. I had to drink two litres of this ghastly stuff called St Mark's Solution every day (on top of my regular drinks) just to stay hydrated; it had bicarb in it, so it was really foul. I used to observe that if that was St Mark's Solution, I hated to think what St Mark's Problem must have been. He also had me back in hospital a few times because he kept destabilising things: once because I was just generally unwell, once for Sidney v Kidneys (thankfully the kidneys did win in the end, but I had to have dialysis briefly), and once, alarmingly, with hyperkalaemia... which meant I'd built up a huge excess of potassium in my blood which could easily have given me a massive heart attack. I spent three years living with Sidney, and it was all fun and games... not.
However, when they installed Sidney, they also installed Sibyl, who started life as a mucous fistula (just a hole into what was left of my colon; she didn't do anything much), but the plan was always that once I'd fully recovered and settled down, they'd convert her into a proper colostomy and get Ridney of Sidney. And so, at the end of May 2019, I was admitted to Addenbrooke's (how I got from Sheffield to East Anglia is part of the same story, but would take too long to recount here), where Sidney went to stoma hell in a bucket, and a little later I woke up with Sibyl in the driving seat, as it were. She had, up to that point, been Silent Sibyl, but she was certainly not silent now in any sense; so she soon became known as Stroppy Sibyl the Cranky Colostomy. I was most relieved to be able to bid farewell to the St Mark's Solution right from the start; these days, in fact, hydration is a rather different issue. I have to be as careful not to drink too much as too little. Too much and it never gets near my kidneys - it just goes straight out through Sibyl, which is sub-optimal.
She's still evil, but only medium-level evil, which is a lot better than Sidney was. (Put it this way - when he went to stoma hell, I strongly suspect he was welcomed onto the staff at once.) She does blow, but for one thing not as often and for another thing not half as messily; and quite often I get some warning and I can rush off and change her before doom is let loose. She's also usually quiet till about lunchtime, which means I can get to church without worrying too much; with Sidney I didn't have a hope. She does tend to be a bit of a pain in the evening, which messes with my social life (and also, sadly, means I can't get to home group, because it's almost never within scooter distance of home, so if she starts playing up I can't just apologise and duck out); but there are ways round. I attend quite a few things on Zoom; one of the few silver linings of lockdown is that everyone now has some kind of video chat software on their computer, and it's usually Zoom. Of course, if she plays up during a Zoom call, I can just go off and sort her out and then come straight back.
As for Wilfred... to my great delight they let him into the operating theatre (both times, I think) so that I'd have him as soon as I woke up; but when I was admitted to the Northern General they thought he was a little bit mucky to be brought into such a clean environment, so he got an unexpected bath. They really did think of absolutely everything.
And here I still am, nine years later, by the grace of God and the amazing skill and dedication of the NHS. I did not, after all, put a blot on my family's impressive longevity record (my great-uncle lived to be 100, my father to 94, and my mother is still going strongish at almost 87). I feel pretty much like Hezekiah, in fact, except that unlike him I don't know exactly how many years have been added to my life. But however many there are... expect me to make the most of them!
