Catheter, Come Home. Steve Rudd

saying ‘come in, number 55, your time is up.’ I supposed I ought to let Debbie know what was going on, and one of the nurses said they’d call her.

      Then they got me ready for the operating theatre and put me into one of those backless gowns which I have never quite understood the rationale for, but I was hardly in a position to argue. Another nurse appeared, hovering by the bed, and explained that she was a Stoma Nurse, who had come to mark me up. I wasn’t really processing what she was saying, in fact, up til that point, I had survived 55 years thinking that Stoma was an island in The Hebrides, but it turned out that what she wanted to do was to draw on my body with a felt pen where the surgeon had to attach a poo bag if it turned out I needed one. She actually marked two positions on my distended, painful stomach, presumably annotating them with ‘cut here’ or some other helpful comment, I was past caring, feeling tears weren’t far away, wishing there was time to discuss things with Deb, wondering what she would do, or think, or say, about the prospect of me having to have a colostomy bag. Even the old joke about having the shoes to match didn’t cheer me up.

      The simple fact is, dear reader, I was scared. I quite like being alive, for all its many faults and shortcomings, death is a much dodgier proposition, I mean it might turn out to be all sweetness and light and a world without pain, injustice, and Celine Dion records, but who knows? And I certainly didn’t feel ready to find out, that summer’s day, as I lay there in a really bleak place inside my head, thinking of everyone else outside enjoying themselves.

      Eventually, the nurse who’d been on duty all morning came back, and said they were still having trouble finding Debbie, and it was time for me to go to theatre. Well, I thought, I always wanted to be on the stage, and the show must go on. I turned to her,

      “I’m scared,” I said. “What if I die?”

      “You’ll be alright,” she replied, matter-of-factly. “I’m coming up there with you, anyway.”

      She was as good as her word, and stayed with me while the porters wheeled me down the ward, along more seemingly endless corridors, into a lift, up or down, I had no idea, out of the lift again, and into a sort of wide foyer area where a bloke in scrubs was waiting for me. He was the anaesthetist, it turned out, and he had loads of forms for me to sign, to say that if I died I wouldn’t come back and haunt them, and stuff like that. She wished me luck, and I was sad to see her go.

      Then they wheeled me into a sort of antechamber, and he asked me, slightly irrelevantly, I thought, whether I minded if these girls (he indicated a group of student nurses behind him) watched me being put under. I said I had no objection, and I realised what it was about him that was odd, he sounded Australian. I was still pondering why anyone would swop Australia for Huddersfield when I realised he was fixing the mask over me and playing up to the gallery of appreciative girls behind him (well, he was Australian) doing all the classic anaesthetist things of saying ‘count backwards from ten’ and shit like that, and then the darkness closed over me.

       3: Now ICU, now I don’t

      I woke up in a recovery room, and vaguely registered that Debbie and her mother were there, plus a new nurse I had never met before. That was about all I knew. In fact I wasn’t even sure who I was, or why. I drifted in and out. When I woke up again, a couple of times, later, they were still there, talking about me as if I wasn’t, and in fact I probably wasn’t.

      I’ve no idea how much time I passed in this state, but when I was eventually comps mentis enough to take notice again, the nurse gave me a little thing like a clicky button into my feeble hand, and told me it was the pain management system. Any time I felt the pain, I was to click the little button and that would send a shot of painkiller into my system via the drip. (I was, of course, still hooked up to all of the various drips and catheters and things, so much so that I’d grown startlingly used to having them by me.)

      I tried a few experimental clicks and was immediately suffused with a feeling of warmth and well-being. I could get used to this, I thought, and the best thing is, it’s non-addictive, or so the nurse had said.

      After a while, it became clear to me that, although I was talking perfectly lucidly and calmly to Debbie and her mum, or so I thought, from their reactions I was in fact being totally random and incoherent, and increasingly so, in direct proportion to how often I used the self-administered “pain control system”. Oh, what the hell, give it another couple of clicks, what harm can it do? By the time my sister and my brother-in-law arrived, I was reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet about ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ to the nurse. Since I had apparently chosen this bizarre activity precisely to demonstrate to everyone in the room that I was in control of things, clearly it showed I wasn’t, after which they took my clicker away from me, and grumpily, I fell asleep.