Slept well until 6am. Blood pressure. Pulse. Light. Painkillers. Laxatives – because codeine will do that to you…
Breakfast – toast, butter, jam, tea.
Decide to distract Charlie, so tell him that he was making a lot of noise in the night, and I had recorded it for him to hear. “Really?” he asked, as I handed the earphones to him. I then played the Derek and Clive (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) sketch, Nurse. If you don’t know this one, you can find it here – Nurse!. He almost wet the bed laughing at that, and for the rest of our time on that ward, whenever a “certain sound” emanated from his direction, I would pop my head up and call “Nurse!”, and Charlie would chuckle away.
My wife arrives at 10am with bacon and egg muffins for me and Charlie. Delicious!
We go to Joseph’s office, and he checks my tremor and makes some small adjustments to my neurostimulator. The brain will be swollen where the electrodes have been inserted, and as this recedes, so the effects of stimulation change. The tremors that have crept back since yesterday are calmed, and Joseph tells me that I can leave the hospital for a while, take a stroll, even go out to dinner. It’s Friday today, so no more adjustments until Monday. If I think that I need further adjustment before the weekend, I just have to wander round to Joseph’s office before 5pm.
Joseph cleaned the wounds on my head and chest, and then plastered me in sterile dressings. I felt like a proper twit, but I think it made me more aware of the danger of infection, so that could only be a good thing. The last thing I wanted at this point was to get an infection and then have to have all of the hardware removed.
An old friend of mine comes to visit, and we go to the cafe for a coffee and then into Queen Square to sit in the Spring sunshine. It feels good to be drinking with a steady hand, sitting and chatting without thrusting my hands in my pockets or sitting on them to keep them still. Got a few strange looks because of my headful of dressings, mind you.
Martha Orbach came to see us this afternoon bearing gifts! A beautiful hand made card and a bottle of red wine 🙂 She was able to tell us about the operation from an observer’s point of view. Even in retrospect it was reassuring.
