As February goes on, we have had a few cooler days - and more importantly cooler nights. There's nothing like a hot and humid night to set you up for a bad start to the next day. Although I did manage to get uncomfortably warm today when I dozed off in my chair in the afternoon sun after I got back from a meeting of the Sunday lunch club.
(This is similar but different to the Friday lunch club; there have only ever been two people who have belonged to both of them. I wonder if I could start calling the monthly meetings of the Friends Of Missions group the Thursday lunch club?) Maybe I could blame my nap on reading a chapter of a Henry James novel after I got home -- no, that wouldn't be fair. Probably the plate of lamb's fry I had at the hotel in South Hobart was the culprit.
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The 11th was a Tuesday. I slept reasonably well and had a light breakfast while the morning news show A.M. filled my ears with the (mostly bad) news of the day. The usual routine of feeding the animals and downloading yesterday's podcasts, then morning tea while I read the first six chapters of my new novel THE SPARROW (1996) the first novel by Mary Doria Russell. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, James Tiptree Jr. Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award.
Light drizzle for a few minutes at midday. The weather forecast for this week is confounding. They predict a heatwave for Thursday, then a cool change late in the week, possibly including snow flurries up on Mount Wellington! In the meantime I have to go out to buy bread to replace the loaves that went mouldy during the warm weekend afternoons.
Here's the longer version of how I ended up in hospital on Wednesday. Skip it if you want to.
Lunchtime on Wednesday I left home intending to be away for a couple hours at the first meeting for the year of our church's Bible Study Connect Group. I got to my destination, a house in the hills above Sandy Bay and parked out front. I took my walking stick and carefully picked my way across to the path that led uphill to the house. Now because it was almost three months since I'd been there, I had partly forgotten the steepness of the slope, particularly that I usually walked up the left hand side of the path which was the easier and more level side of the path. I absent-mindedly pointed myself straight at the house and walked forward - straight into the steeper and more curved side of the path.
You can guess the rest. I took two or three steps and couldn't understand why I suddenly felt unsteady and out of balance. I jammed my stick into the ground behind me, trying to steady myself, but the path was concrete and it didn't help at all. I felt myself falling backwards and a moment later I felt my body and my head hit the ground; I later found that I had come down on my right buttock, my right elbow and the right side of my head.
A nice young couple who were walking down the street saw me fall and hurried to my aid. Another member of the Connect Group was just arriving and she hurried up to the house to summon help. With support, I made it into the house and the lady of the house (an ex-nurse) tended to the grazes on my elbow, the only place that was actually bleeding. I was vaguely surprised at how quickly the right side of my head had swollen up, and when I phoned my doctor he was quick to advise me to seek attention at the hospital where I could be checked for concussion.
So that's how I ended up in the waiting room at the Emergency Department. This wasn't my first fall, but all the other times I'd been brought in by ambulance. I composed myself and took a seat among the crowd, knowing I might be sitting there for some time. There were young men, old women, mothers with children, the whole variety of humanity waiting patiently to be fed into the system. I gradually worked my way from one waiting room to another, seeing various doctors and being X-rayed, ECGed, blood-tested, blood-pressure checked and given all the usual tests to see if I was "with it" or not.
By the end, I felt I was right on the cusp of going/staying. I had nothing except the clothes I stood up in, my wallet, my phone and my walking stick. I had spoken to some of my friends, and promised to keep them informed if any decision was made. Finally a doctor told me that they'd like their physiotherapist to assess my walking, so they'd like to keep me in overnight so I could see him first thing in the morning. Okay then. I was placed in a wheelchair and whisked through the rabbit warren that is the Royal Hobart Hospital and into a section of the building I didn't recognize.
They stopped at the door of a room that looked unusually modern. It reminded me of nothing so much as a smaller version of the astronaut's room in the movie 2001. There was a comfortable bed surrounded by all manner of machinery, thankfully none of them beeping at me. I was given one of those hospital robes that feel like a sarong and some sandwiches and a hot drink. They even charged up my mobile phone for me, enabling me to text people and say I'd see them tomorrow.
One of the staff came round with the inevitable form for me to sign and initial. I duly did so, reflecting on how my signature had deteriorated in the last decade.
As I drifted off to sleep, it struck me that nobody had looked at the bandage on my elbow. I guess it looked so professional that all the staff must have assumed somebody else had dressed the wound. I made a mental note to mention it to my friend; she would probably be amused to discover she hadn't lost the knack.
So the next day, I woke up and looked at the clock, wondering how the animals were faring at home They had probably gone to sleep last night thinking I must have gone out and forgotten their supper. I hoped to be home in time to feed them lunch. It was odd to think that my clock radio would be broadcasting the latest news to an empty bedroom. It reminded me of that Ray Bradbury story about the automated house that kept to its routine even after its owners had been vaporised in a nuclear war.
A nice woman with a clipboard came round with some personal questions to ask me. I've done this before, though last time I had regarded the questioner with some suspicion, wondering if she was a spy for the Public Trustee. This was a much jollier occasion, with my inquisitor and I sharing a laugh at some of my answers. At one point, she asked me the routine question "Do you know where you are?" I thought for a second and said I knew I was in hospital but I had no idea what part of it. "This is the EMU" she said. I looked blank and she added "The Emergency Medical Unit." Trust them to have thought up a new three-letter-acronym!
So the Physiotherapist came round, watched me walk around and asked me a few questions. He was surprised when I told him I'd been on the waiting list for a cardio consultation for 53 weeks. He said he would write to my GP. He said I'd be told I could go home shortly, and I was. I asked at the nurses' station was there any paperwork before I left and they shook their heads - "There isn't even anything for you to sign," they said. "You're free to go."
And so I did just that. While I waited for friends to pick me up and go down to Sandy Bay to pick up my car, I cautiously ran my hand over my scalp. I could still feel the swollen area, but it was definitely going down and I suspected nobody would even notice it if I didn't regale them with the story of my latest head injury.
And if you've read this far, congratulations.
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I sneezed as soon as I walked though the back door this afternoon. Obviously the climate indoors isn't as variable as it is outdoors. (Headline in today's paper SNOW FALLS AS FIRES STILL RAGE).
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Could make a party game out of this - who would you like to be shipwrecked with? My choice would be Sorrel Wilby. Sorrel Wilby is an award-winning adventurer, becoming the first person ever (with hubby Chris) to traverse the Himalaya (6500km) on foot in 1991. I have selfish reasons for this choice. I know that on the first day she would have located a source of fresh water and gathered edible fruits and nuts. On the second day she would have built a makeshift shelter for us. By the fourth day she would probably have constructed a raft for us to escape the island. (I used to watch her on television leading expeditions up the side of active volcanic mountains, so I feel not much is beyond her.)
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An anecdote I forgot to put in my story about my trip to hospital... Halfway through the afternoon I had worked my way up the ladder to one of the smaller waiting rooms with half a dozen other patients. We were sitting around waiting; every so often one would leave or another one would arrive. I was sitting there in a semi-trance, afraid to look at anything on my phone because I was afraid of flattening the battery. I read all the posters on the walls and amused myself by trying to make anagrams out of the words in the warning notices.
One thing didn't amuse me though. Looking straight ahead from where I sat, there was a rack of boxes on the wall that held various sizes of disposable gloves. There were four of them. Three were one way up, the other one was upside down. Whenever my gaze passed over them, I involuntarily read the labels on three of them. Trying to ignore the fourth box was a losing battle. Finally, I stood up and walked across to the waste paper basket on the other side of the room. I dropped some scrap paper into the basket, standing so my body blocked the view of the rack from outside the room. Quickly and quietly I grabbed the miscreant box out of the rack, reversed it and slid it back into place. Order was restored to the universe. It took about two seconds, and nobody would have seen me do it.
Then I heard a woman's voice from the other side of the room.
"Oh thank heavens. That's been driving me crazy ever since I sat down!"
*
Tuesday I woke from a good night's sleep. That's the good news. An hour after breakfast, my stomach started doing handstands. You would have thought it was trying to stage a coup d'état. I wasn't game to leave home for quite a while.
In the evening, I took a cab out to the Quiz Night. It was only a 15-minute ride and somehow I spent ten minutes of it answering questions about the Bible from the cab driver. I must remember to turn down my halo before I go out in public in future.
Only three of the usual team were present, but between us we covered a lot of general knowledge. I may note that I scored 10/10 in Science & Nature and we finished in second place with a respectable 75 points. As usual there were a couple of stumbling blocks (try as I might, I could not remember Jerry Springer's name) and I'm still scratching my head over the question that asked for a word with all the vowels in it. I came up with "aqueous" but the word they wanted was "queuing".
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I am not a doctor, I'm not even a hypochondriac. But we all know our own bodies and wonder at any unexpected changes we experience. While suffering from my usual summer cold, I had two bouts of diarrhoea in ten days - the second one fairly spectacular. I cannot think of anything unusual in my diet this month. Is it possible that the mucus I've been coughing up (and mostly swallowing) has somehow acted as a lubricant on my digestive tract and caused the process of peristalsis to become unexpectedly rapid, fast-tracking the waste products through the gut? Or am I just suffering from the age-old layman's problem, trying to ascribe a simple cause to a complex problem...
Books for the shortest month:
A LONDON LIFE by Henry James, 1888
CALL MR. FORTUNE by H.C. Bailey, 1920
THE DAGGER AFFAIR by David McDaniel, 1965
THE SPARROW by Mary Doria Russell, 1996
THE CINEMATIC LEGACY OF FRANK SINATRA by David Wills, 2016
