Sixty-four

Well that was horrid afternoon! I give thanks for remembering to give thanks for the comfy chair at least...

I give thanks for completing the most pressing tasks of the morning - making my lunch and writing letters, making phone calls and sending emails about various medical matters.  There were loads of confusing automated texts about transport for later but you can't answer them and anyway it seems to be par for the course. I give thanks the driver called to ask where I lived while I was still indoors and could hear him! He'd arrived a bit earlier than I expected so I was grateful he stopped by the post box for me to post the freshly stamped post, but then as soon as I was settled back in the car I started getting loads more messages and realised I'd been sent two taxis - one from each hospital!

I got off the phone from calling about that in time to work up a bit of a tizz about trusting my treatment to new hands. Then I failed the quiz about what needles I had, what anaesthetic, pump flow etc. I kept saying look I'm a beginner, I'd no idea on Friday I'd need to know these things today or I'd have asked... Then I was made to feel bad about my blood pressure being high!

Next I discovered there was no internet acceas, then someone came up and told me I'd be here all week and I started getting tearful fretting that they meant to transfer me permanently instead of to the place I thought had been agreed. Then the ward clerk had twenty unanswerable questions about who had booked my transport and how I was getting home, then she came back and said it was sorted for later today but when I asked about later in the week she went off on one again and wanted to know who'd told me. And of course I didn't know the answer to that either...and was getting increasingly distressed.

Then someone else came up and started grilling me about who had said what, wanting a name, description. She said patients had had letters about  'areas' and I would probably be coming there in the long term not the place I wanted and I really started crying. Really? Spend the rest of my life with these unsympathetic people and abandon all plans of fitting treatment into my life instead of the other way round. She gave me a paper towel and disappeared for a while before coming back to say it really would only be for this week. I was sceptical but decided to concentrate on making sure it was at least in the afternoon...

Then she went off and discussed my anxieties in the corridor outside and the one who'd said I'd be here all week came and explained how poorly patients who had gone over to the main unit were. Nonetheless they'd decided to send me back there as despite being 'younger and more stable' (medically) than the other patient on a temporary transfer they had run out of afternoon slots and I was clearly a drama queen. Well, they weren't her exact words but that was the implication! Maybe I am, I don't know, but I don't remember being messed about, bullied and interrogated being in any of the literature I was given on renal therapy, and there was really no need for it to happen or for anyone to blame me...