From hopeless to hopeful

We have a bed for you

18 nights before, I arrived dying, in pain and hopelessly unaware of the seriousness of my condition. Tentatively, I had just one change of underwear but no inkling of what might ensue. From what my GP (General Practitioner) and the medical personnel saw, my condition was grave necessitating immediate admission to the hospital. It is from that assessment that Tuesday morning that the statement, “We have a bed for you upstairs,” met the urgency for action on my situation.

Much as I wanted the security and safety of the crenelations of my home, I was in no fit state to be at home except if I had a death wish. Over the period of time as I pined to return home, tests, biopsies, treatments, a course of chemotherapy, pills, suppositories, injections and unfortunately utterly tasteless food triggering emesis had done their bit, the last hurdle to clear was after-discharge care.

Before you go home

They needed a nurse to visit me at home daily to dress the fungating tumour lesions and assess my welfare. Until that was settled, I was going nowhere. Marcella had offered to have me stay with her, she already had her own ordeal with cancer and wonderful as that offer was, I just wanted to go back home to my own bed.

On Friday the 9^th of October 2009, I was discharged from the hospital, I bid my ward colleagues and the nurses goodbye and called a taxicab to take me home. To the quiet, the serenity, the comfort and the security of my own place where I could either rest, ponder, or be tormented by what future lay ahead of me. It was the beginning of my new life.

Getting to tell better stories

These blogs twelve years on from when I had to go hospital for the treatment of HIV presenting as full-blown AIDS with the opportunistic infection and cancer of Kaposi’s sarcoma are as I recall what has become part of the story of my life before I have gone to review the blogs I wrote on those particular days. My hope is that whatever we might be going through, we eventually get to tell better stories.

Blog - Home - At last

Blogs - The Cancer Tales (2009)

The twelve-year recollections

Blog - Chemotherapy was taking death to gain life – 5^th October

Blog - How I battled HIV stigma – 1^st October

Blog - We can treat this – 1^st October

Blog - 12 Years on ARVs – 30^th September

Blog - One Tuesday morning in September – 22^nd September

One Tuesday morning in September

And I remember

It is the memories that stick so close to you in the stories you are given to tell and the gratitude you have for life. The 22^nd of September 2009 was a Tuesday, I had called a cab and my on-off partner, Marc was riding with me to the hospital. I took a change of underwear and nothing else, as I was unaware of what to expect.

My doctor had expedited an appointment at the hospital upon observing the fungating tumours quite prominent on the left foot sole up the big toe and the one next to it. My right foot was painful, but nothing had appeared yet. She dressed the wounds with generous amounts of Betadine solution and gave me strong painkillers that killed none of the pain.

A bed for you upstairs

This was my second hospital visit as the first that she scheduled for the Thursday before instigated a referral to the Internal Medicine department. On arrival at the hospital, Marc fetched a wheelchair and wheeled me in to see the consultants. The first two simply summoned the Internist, a professor of medicine and upon seeing me, he said, “You can’t go back home, we have a bed for you upstairs.”

I was dying of AIDS and the fungating tumours were lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an aggressive skin cancer that could so easily be fatal and between the pain and cancer, they could have been on a race to do me in. Soon, I was in a bed and then taken to blood pressure tests at all my extremities to ensure my condition was not related to diabetes.

My first night to recovery

After that, I was taken to another room where high-resolution pictures were taken of my feet and the lesions before being returned to my ward and given some pain medication. The day was uneventful, some intravenous lines were fitted for antibiotics and saline solutions, lots of blood was drawn for analysis, I got some sleep, but the day was blur.

At night, I took some pills, had a morphine patch applied to my chest and an injection into my thigh to prevent blood clots and other issues with spending a lot of time in bed. I prayed a prayer completely unsure of my future, but that was the beginning of my new life and much else that followed.

Blog - In hospital to kill the pain

Dreamscape: Twice the dereliction of responsibility?

Doors not closed

Maybe there is a cautionary note to it, as I am aware the dream world does portend a kind of awareness that should not be dismissed without consideration.

In that realm, I found that I left a temporary residence ensconced in my memory from my teenaged years on a bicycle late at night in search of activities that happened more into my 30s. Nothing had happened by the time I decided to return when I found myself in the company of other female cyclists who were tenants there too.

On getting to the house, the main garage door was ajar, and a thought occurred to me that I might have been responsible for leaving the place unsecured, but I could not tell. It meant I had to go in first armed with a chair to check if there was an intruder on the premises and thankfully there was none and it did not appear anything had been lost or stolen.

Realms within dreams

As I went to bed, I was troubled by the idea that I should have owned up to being careless with security even though I had no recollection of it. Then, within the same dream, I relived another instance when I had returned to see the door ajar, my reckoning then suggesting it was my fault.

My cousin then became a protagonist, saying the issue of the lax security had been escalated and he needled me about being the one responsible for the lapse which resulted in some valuable lost property.

Assume before it’s presumed

His magnanimous praise and elevation of a young man who at first appeared to have no prospects deepened my sense of guilt and regret of not immediately taking responsibility with the indication that I would be disgraced and punished, when I was delivered from the nightmare with wakefulness.

Whilst I can think of no interpretation of the dream, it crept into my consciousness that today is my cousin’s birthday, I am not laying too much store in this, but I could not ignore the distress it caused me; the possibility that there might be something I am responsible for that has been left undone requiring I immediately without hesitation assume blame for than prolong the mental agony of concealment in the search of exculpation or acquittal.

In hospital to kill the pain

A bed far from home

It was as unexpected as I was to find myself in shock. What began as a visit to the doctor last Wednesday that lead to a visit to see a consultant on Friday just thickened in plot as I found myself not being able to wiggle free.

I was invited for a number of bloods to determine what exactly was the cause of the foot sore that was creating the mother of all pains; I cried like a baby with no pacifier to quench the heat.

Each time my feet were below the level of my heart I felt like my feet were on fire, it was most convenient to just stay in bed; the pain was just too unbearable. The pain killers which were heavy duty multiple strength pills just did not do enough apart from ensure that exhaustion induced sleep.

So, on seeing the consultant on Tuesday, he simply said, we have a bed for you and we are going to sort this thing out – that is how I ended up in a hospital bed since yesterday.

Many morphines to come

I have seen doctors, consultants, interns, nurses and orderlies, not to talk of stewardesses and other people who make the hospital function; it is suddenly no wonder why health costs can be just so high.

My face contorted into the most screwed up look you can have a human being produce from the pain, there was no other alternative than to put me on morphine – that took its time to work its way into my body and ease the pain.

Even so, a nurse on another shift felt that the pills would still work, I was literally begging, give me morphine, I beg of you – I am in a hospital for crying out loud, I am not here to find out how much I can endure pain and seek my pain threshold as a thing of achievement – I am not that mad.

The gender of food

Hospital food is well, just what it is until I ended up with the gluten-free bread meant for the patient in the next bed – tasteless, YuK! Yuk!

I was however bothered because the bread was clearly labelled for the lady, I do not remember undergoing a gender reassignment overnight though the sojourn of pain was enough to turn you into anything.

Even in all this, one has many things to be thankful for, health is wealth, any day anytime, for all that suffer, I wish them all a speedy recovery – yes, I got my netbook delivered to the hospital – there is much to talk about, between the pain, the sheets and the healing.