Dom Davis (The Blog)

I, like many others, hate mondays. So much so I’ve even gone and created a special category for it. Mondays are evil. Usually it’s just a background malevolence but on occasion they attack with extreme viciousness just to remind you they’re there. Yesterday was such a day.

I have a hospital appointment on the 12th of April. I’ve known about this for months. Work has been informed, a car parking space has been booked at the work carpark. Reminders have been put in calendars. Alarms have been set. All I have to do is drive there on the day, drive back to work, finish my day and drive home. Aside from the fact I hate driving into work nothing could be simpler.

No. From across the void the insidious touch of Monday can be felt, whispering in my ear “You have a hospital appointment on Monday”. And so it is that my April goes: Friday the 8th, The Weekend, Monday the 12th. A Monday that sees me waking tired, crawling out of bed and getting ready.

By 7:20 I’m logged into work remotely. This disturbs The Zozo on her day off but needs must and the hospital appointment means I’ll be in late.

By 8:00 I’m out of the house and taking the car to work. A car that The Zozo was going to use.

By 8:15 I realise it’s the 11th. My appointment it tomorrow and Monday has, in one fell swoop, buggered up my day, The Zozos day and had my drive into work unnecessarily. Not bad for that time in the morning. Monday had not finished there though.

Thankfully the drive to work was uneventful. It’s the school holidays so the roads were peaceful. By the afternoon I was feeling rough though. I suspect I was just tired but by 3 I had a raging headache. I thought it would be best to leave the car at work overnight and get the train home. Monday thought otherwise. I had no coat, Monday had a big raincloud. Mercifully Monday didn’t get wind of my change of plan until too late and I spent my journey home racing the rain. I won. Just.

Feeling spiteful Monday got it’s revenge by letting the milk leak in the fridge overnight. I hate Mondays.

So yesterday’s galavanting around the country meant my evening was rather a right off. I pretty much returned home to go straight to bed, followed by 6am happening some 4 hours too early and the need to get up and go to work staring me in the face.

That said, it’s been a short week and what with all the bank holidays and being ill I’ve had rather a lot of time off recently. Assuming tomorrows procedure happens as planned I’ll be having even more. By this time tomorrow I should be sat in a waiting room waiting my turn to answer the barrage of questions regarding allergies, crowns and the like before changing into the fetching hospital gown, heading to the next waiting room before being prodded somewhere…er… intimate. Deep joy. There will then follow a period of convalescing done from home. Expect many blog entries the follow the lines of “ow”.

Do you know why I know you don’t have the flu? Because you’re reading this! If you had flu you’d be curled up in bed, getting on with the process of dying or, worse, curled up in the shower sobbing pitifully while your body enacts a brutal evacuation plan from all available exits at the same time. Trust me, I’ve been there and it’s not pretty. Flu makes you its bitch for for days, possibly even weeks and it makes you know when you’ve got it. No, my friend, what you have is a cold.

I too have a cold, a particularly unpleasant one at that, which many would probably elevate to flu status, however, I have an excuse to be at home, wrapped up under the duvet. You see my cold, and the cold sores I’m getting, and the wicked throat infection, are all courtesy of a shot immune system brought on by quite a bad kidney infection which, along with persistent and quite annoying gout in both feet, appears to be the side effect of a kidney stone. One which the NHS have failed to remove. Twice.

The reason I mention flu is because its one of the few things that will stop me playing computer games. Chronic pylonephritis also has this effect, as do some of the more severe kidney infections and, for different reasons, kidney stones, although to be fair I’ve historically collapsed at work with those rather than at home. What they all have in common is a certain amount of waiting for, wishing for, or actively begging for death. You can imagine my consternation, therefore, when on the morning on the 27th with no wife and my few chores completed my body decided that rather than firing up the big computer and having a blast on a game of my choice it would rather curl up on the bed and drift vaguely in and out of conciousness. As an avid fan of House I decided to use differential diagnosis to determine the nature of my illness wile I lay there. The slight fever and mild hallucinations might have also played a part here.

First up, kidney stones. A lack of sudden, sharp stabbing pain like someone has plunged a red hot knife deep into your lower back rather ruled that out. Yes, my kidneys hurt, but not in a pick your pain wracked body off the floor type way. I mean, yes, I have a kidney stone, but it’s not on the scale of some of the monsters I’ve hatched and it’s been relatively well behaved since Valentines Day when it decided to treat The Zozo to a trip to A&E. Perhaps it knows we’re coming to get it. Actually I suspect the sudden reduced liquid intake in preparation for the removal is the cause of most of my current problems. Anyway, I digress…

Flu then? I’ve found with flu that you generally have some indication that it’s coming. There was no indication about this. No achy arms and legs. No plunge beyond the general cold symptoms and into the depths of flu. There was also no requirement to retreat to the shower. In fact no nausea at all, or indeed… other things. Not flu.

Lack of nausea also ruled out pylonephritis too, chronic or otherwise. The tiredness and kidney pain matched, but the desire to constantly vomit wasn’t there and there wasn’t the 6 months of feeling run down before hand.

What we’re left with is kidney infection. High temperature, extreme tiredness, pain in the kidneys, burning sensation when peeing. Yup, kidney infection. In time this leads to temperatures of well over 100, vomiting, sweat fuelled nights, extreme tiredness and a body that’s unable to fight off anything else. Like, for example, general colds and the like that you’d get from waiting at the out of hours doctors surgery, such as the type they have at North Walsham Hospital to deal with people like me on bank holidays.

So no, I don’t have flu, I have a cold. But I get to curl up on the sofa and be waited on hand and foot while my wife tends to me, because, unlike you, it’s not just a cold. It’s a cold, among other things. Now, if you’ll excuse me I have the majority of our bathroom medicine cabinet to tip down my throat in order to try and make me feel vaguely human again.

4:55am. That’s what time my alarm went off this morning. 4:55am because, at 5am I became nil by mouth. Shortly after that brutal alarm call it was time to get up, get ready and face the treacherous roads, the snow, the freezing fog and the ice. All so I could enter the great machine that is the NHS at 7:15am ready for them to process me in the morning batch.

1pm, some 8 hours after getting up, and 6 hours after getting there I’m told they’re very sorry, but I’ve been cancelled and they’ll reschedule sometime next year.

The reason for this cancellation? The air-conditioning in the operating theatres was broken due to the pipes freezing solid. There is a deep, deep irony there.

This is the second time this has been cancelled and it’s seriously beginning to cock up our plans. I miss private healthcare.

I have tomorrow off. And Friday. Then on Monday I go into hospital for a quick dynorodding (don’t ask). The rest of the week will be spent recovering. Then it’s Christmas, then two days off in lieu of Christmas. All of which means that today is my last day at work until the three between Christmas and New Year. And let’s face it, those aren’t exactly the most taxing of days in many offices.

This, does of course, have a possible impact on blog entries. The next few days The Zozo and I are treating as a holiday so I wouldn’t expect much in the way of output from me. Monday starts very early and ends up with me being in a fair amount of discomfort which, again, may have a negative impact on blog writing. Tuesday onwards is where it starts to get fun. While there will be ample time to construct entries I will probably be quite heavily medicated which is going to greatly reduce coherence. Expect weirdness (more so than usual).

Normal service will probably resume on the 4th, although you pays your money (metaphorically speaking) and you takes your chances.

However many years ago it was I last saw my urologist he told me I had a small kidney stone on the right hand side. It wasn’t doing much so he suggested we leave it and see what happened. There are two ways this stone can leave my body: naturally and artificially. Passing a stone smarts a little and it’s the kind of thing you notice. I’ve not passed the stone. lithotripsy, ureteroscopy and other artificial methods of getting rid of stones are also not the kind of thing that would go unnoticed so I think we can safely say I still have a stone.

These days I no longer have the fancy health insurance with the Harley Street urologists and am dependent on the NHS who, while great at scooping you up off the floor and getting you going again, can be a bit slow for non urgent things. If we remember I rocked up to A&E on valentines day complaining of a kidney stone. They x-rayed me, gave me some nice painkillers (although not the really nice ones) and sent me home with the message that they’d be in touch.

A few months later I got a letter saying I’d been referred to a consultant and that they wanted to give me a CT scan. CT scans are much more fun than X-Rays (and infinitely more fun than IVUs which are basically a legal form of diagnostic torture) so that was cool. Then I had to go speak to the consultant (pitch up to outpatients, wait for over an hour) to be told the CT was inconclusive and they wanted to do another CT. Could have been done by letter, but at least I was being processed. CT the second was a few weeks ago.

Today I got a letter from my consultant. Turns out I have a kidney stone. It’s not moved since the first CT and they’d like to remove it. Apparently they are now able to see the kidney stone on my original X-Ray “now that they know what they’re looking for”. Clue was in the “I have a kidney stone in my right hand side”, but there you go, at least they found this one (they’re now 2 for 5).

I’m now on a waiting list for a rather fun little procedure where they shove a laser up your… well, lets just say they put you to sleep and when you wake up there’s no stone and it hurts like hell to pee. This is an overnight job which will then involve a couple of days recovery. Why am I telling you all this? Well basically I will require VAST amounts of sympathy during the recovery time and I want you all to be prepared.

This morning I woke up with a slight twinge in my side. Nothing unusual in that. These days I wake up with all kinds of aches and twinges, but todays twinge didn’t go away. Instead it decided to get steadily worse until, at about 8am, I decided enough was enough and I was going to fight back with some of the more potent pain killers in our medicine cabinet. Unfortunately these take time to kick in and I ran out of the quick fix tactical nuclear pain killers some time ago so things started to get even more painful.

After a few minutes walking round the house in a fashion similar to the oh-my-god-I-need-the-loo-but-someone-is-in-the-bathroom thing the people do when they don’t think anyone else is looking [or is that just me?] I decided I’d better pack a bag with a few bits in it just in case this wasn’t going to get better by itself. After all, I know this pain and the conclusion is, more often than not, A&E.

After having packed my bag¹ things were getting to be really quite bad and it was making me cry so I called in reinforcements to take me somewhere with better pharmacological supplies than I have. Unfortunately, en-route we found out that the local drop in places wouldn’t take me and that I was going to have to go to A&E (see, told you). Joy.

1 hour later and I’m being dressed in one of those ever so fetching gowns with a nurse shoving a cannula² in my arm and another nurse doing the blood pressure and temperature thing. Of course, by this time the pain was easing and I’m beginning to think that maybe I should have just ridden it out and not bothered everyone.

6 hours after that and I’ve been X-rayed, pumped full of contrast, X-rayed again several times, peed into tubes and pots, had blood taken and told a number of people that I woke up this morning and I started hurting in the same way I hurt the previous God knows how many times I’ve had kidney stones.

Upshot of it all is they can’t see a stone (although that’s not to say there isn’t one there), they can see inflamation, there is blood in my urine and they’ve given the the pharmacological items I need to stop it hurting should it start again³). Although this morning I was in very real pain time has dulled the memory of the pain and I am left thinking perhaps it was all a storm in a teacup :s Still, for places to take your fiancée on valentines day A&E has to be up there on the list

¹ Clean underwear, clean tshirts, clean socks, laptop, charger for laptop, charger for iPhone, headphones – no toothbrush or toothpaste :S

² You know, the things they jab in your arm with the 18foot metal spikes that stick into your veins and will rip your arm open causing you to bleed to death if you so much as think about looking at it in the wrong way just so they can take blood and pump you full of contrast easily.

³ Unfortunately none of it opiate or synthetic opiate based but I they’re moving away from that these days and at the end of the day if it stops the owie I’m happy.