You know all about shit, smoking gives you lung cancer, so there I am thinking and feeling like I have inhaled some toxic fumes at work, sore throat, tight across chest, feel crook, but 20 minutes later it ain’t going away so call the paramedics and an hour later I’m being wheeled out of the operating theater having had stents put in blocked heart arteries, WTF….
Of course afterwards you get all the questions, do you drink, do you do drugs, do you fuck midgets, until you say “yes” to something, smoking in my case, and then you’re told that’s why you have blocked coronary arteries.
Sounds very convenient, and very exclusive, as a cause that is, so I’ll do my own quiet research over the next few weeks / months.
Quitting smoking is not going to be a 100% cure for all the causal trigger factors, sure, it may well be the biggest single contributory factor, but, it might not, that might be spending all day inhaling welding / soldering fumes, or spending all day inhaling cleansing products fumes, etc etc etc.
Here is the thing, what I call first line care here in the UK, which means the paramedics that turn up when you dial emergency, and which means the surgeons and shit that actually treat you, is pretty fucking good, the problem is, what I call second line care, which is all the other nurses and doctors and so on involved with your hospital stay, are pretty fucking awful, it’s the second lot that will kill you.
When you see human shit splattered on the underside of the toilet seat that has been there for at least 8 hours, and this cubicle in general is dirty, and this is one of two cubicles used by all the patients who are not bed bound (lacking a proper sluice room empty of boxes of shit the nurses use these as sluice rooms for the bed bound patients piss and shit on occasion) and some of the staff, isn’t just a “thing” it should be flatly impossible, except in a place where staff have ample time to moan about their workload and lack of time to write reports, but seemingly unlimited time to discuss holidays and what they are doing at the weekend and office politics and so on.
At that point you can be like me and start getting paranoid scared, so fuck you fuck your “advice” and fuck everything else, I am discharging myself, yeah yeah it will probably kill me and you won’t be held responsible, yeah yeah I know it also means your bed occupancy rate drops and that makes your staffing levels different and affects your own person empire you’re trying to build here, and yeah I get the you literally washing your hands while saying fine, leave, do I look like I give a fuck if you die, medicines, no, we only had three hours since you said you were walking, haven’t had time to forwards it to the pharmacy, or take out of the cupboard what was already allocated to you, so fuck you, walk out as you are with nothing.
So I do, and sure enough the guy who was in the next bed to me, who had a less “urgent” op, who was up and walking around and healthy when I was still connected to tubes in each arm with sensor AND defib patches stuck on my skin, that guy died.
It was a fucking CARDIAC ward and I could have found visible dirt (white cloth and wipe and look test) on any surface I cared to look at…. don’t get me started on the machines being turned up to max volume at night so the staff can slink off and still hear a crash report from the staff room.
Though I say so myself I was conscious throughout the transport to hospital and operation, and the decision to call the emergency services was made when the penny dropped that this wasn’t an inhaled poison thing because it wasn’t going away, despite the apparent lack of stabbing pains, the tiny pupils, thick head, tingling, ache across chest, looking like it must be heart, so the fact is you are contemplating your own death, and I’m one of those who is more scared of the operation and recovery than I am of dying of that shit and that’s a fact…. … so bear all that in mind when I say that after all that, essentially 4 hours after you made the call and 2 hours after you had the op, you feel like you could walk out and carry on with your life as though nothing happened… but you are in ward for recovery and monitoring, the monitoring is to determine the dosage of medicines, but the devices doing the monitoring, well, when you move, their readings change, when your girlfriend leans in to give you a kiss, their readings change, and when they move you to the second ward, and you see the monitor for bed A5 is plugged into the CAT5 socket for bed A4 (you) and the monitor attached to you is plugged into the socket for bed A3 which happens to be empty at that time, because there is something up with the system, and that’s how they deal with it, and by the way does anyone know how to print anything on the new konica printer on the ward? no, oh, well, saves typing up the end of shift reports eh… (and you know IT so you can see the scenarios unfolding) so however calmly you faced death a few hours ago, just staying there in the ward and being monitored and treated and cared for is the scariest and hardest thing you have ever done… that should say something.
I basically ran away, hospitals scare the living shit out of me, if you *can* walk or crawl out of one, do it, is my policy, even though going IN to the hospital will probably save your life, STAYING there is another kettle of fish, and a *completely* different group of staff… what I call second line, not the first line that treated you.
I figure I got lucky, never knew I had a heart problem, basically less than 90 minutes from the onset of the problem to being wheeled out of the operation, which is as good as it gets for heart stuff, and as far as I can tell no lasting ill effects, and at that point I am quite happy to STOP analyzing shit, because all it does is scare and upset you, just let me live my life pretty much as I did before, ok no more smoking and ok need to check out everything else that may have contributed to the issue, but it is a bit “yesterday I did not know I had a problem, and if you wiped the last 24 hours from my memory, I still would not know any different” …..
Whatever happened on that day to cause me to make the call they “cured” with the cath surgery and stents, so…. so don’t overthink it, give a nod to whoever was watching over you that day and carry on, maybe not just as before, but the main thing is to carry on.
But be really really really careful of anything that involves you lying in a bed at someone else’s mercy in a fucking hospital, people die all the time in hospital, and for my 2 cents, by no means is all of that because they were gonna go anyway, I reckon there are plenty who die BECAUSE they were in hospital.
Peace.