The Hospital: Act 2

Not just my relief

It’s hard to describe how I felt being wheeled up in the trolley. Being told I was going to be ok was, of course, the best piece of news, and it meant I wasn’t going to have my head cut open. Which, for some reason, at the time seemed a major thing going through my mind.

As I made it back to the ward, I saw my wife, who had just arrived and was upset and apologising because she didn’t know what was happening and only found out I was going to the theatre earlier, and before she could continue, I told her.

“I’m going to be ok.”

She was crying a lot, and I was exhausted. I don’t remember much more, to be honest.

I think I was wheeled back into my little bay, and I just wanted to sleep, although I think I told her a bit about it all. I do remember that the hole in my leg started to hurt a little bit at some point, and the bruise started to come out instantly. It’s not every day you get stabbed in the groin,

Seeing my wife like this, it dawned on me exactly what everyone else might have been going through.

It’s easy to be absorbed in your world, to be thinking about what ifs, and how and why, etc, but emotionally, other people are perhaps living through something far worse.

This was a lesson I tried to hold on to in the months ahead.

Prognosis

A combination of drugs, pain and confusion makes this bit extremely challenging, but the nurse, a well-respected lady called Cat, came to see me, I think the next day.

She explained what had happened, a subarachnoid brain haemorrhage (SAH), and that 10-15% of these are without explanation. So, of course, I asked for an explanation.

A ‘SAH’, in my case a Non-Aneurysmal Perimesencephalic Subarachnoid Haemorrhage, is essentially bleeding into the space around the brain. This space is filled with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and is never supposed to have anything in it, other than CSF.

She explained that the blood needs to go somewhere, and this will be painful as it works its way down your spinal column and is dispelled by the body. Discomfort may have been an understatement, but we’ll get to that later.

She essentially said that recovery is different for everyone, that it is unknown and will take time.

I was now living with a brain injury.

How do you feel when you’re on your own?

Alone, I didn’t know what to think.

I had survived something serious. But how serious was it?

The ward was pleasant enough, but it felt like a serious place; some people in here were very sick indeed. I was in the ‘green’ section, but ‘red’ around the corner is not a good place to be.

That time alone was a mixture of scary, sudden, thought-provoking, worrying and downright confusing.

I just felt like this was going to be some hard shit, I couldn’t put my finger on why, I just had a feeling that this was no run of the mill thing.

At the same time, it was the ultimate, last one you’re gonna have, wake-up call.

Oh, wait, I can’t walk

I had been lying down for about 48 hours, using a cardboard thing to go to the bathroom, and my whole body felt stiff, and I was just wiped out.

For the first time, I sort of acknowledged that I was due a stay in the hospital, and it was time to come to terms with it.

So I went to swing my legs out of bed and soon realised that was not really an option. I didn’t have the strength, and they just felt like they were not going to work very well. So I swung them back in and had a further realisation that this was more than a headache, and I was soon to find out why.

Over the coming days, my resolve would be tested in ways that it never had before.

I was about to go back to a place I thought I had escaped a few days earlier. A place that I would give anything not to go back to again, and the one thing that has left a permanent mark on me - the pain.