In the last three years this has been an all too familiar occurrence for me, especially in anticipation of my last op, where the last time someone cancelled on me that many times was back in the early noughties when I had just got on the dating scene... We're happily married now but that's another story.
I've been called three days prior to my op with many apologies. I've been sat in Frankie and Bennies stuffing my face with what I thought was my final meal for a good while when I've received the call. And I've been gowned up, sat in a hospital bed, three hours past my scheduled time only to be told that the procedure would be unable to go ahead that day.
It's never the surgeons fault, they're overly apologetic, almost to the point of begging for forgiveness. I suppose they anticpiate that some people will take it a little harder than others, perhaps picking up the hospital bed and launching it through the window or even worse, putting in a written complaint to the hospital board.
But whilst I've been sat on one side of the scale, I've also weighed down the other. My last op I was stuck in Intensive Care two days longer than I should have been. They wanted to shift me to the High Dependancy Unit but couldn't because they were waiting to shift someone from there to the ward and the patient on the ward couldn't be moved because they were waiting for a bed to become available at another hospital, where they were waiting for another patient to depart... Still following? Me neither.
Finally though I got moved to HDU where again I spent two days longer there than I should have. My collapsed lung was causing all kinds of nonsense and the only way to get it back to working capacity was to take a little trek every now and then, which was no easy feat with a drip, oxygen cylinder and six lead mobile frequency transmitter in tow. Just taking just a short walk was a challenge in itself, since being in HDU every time I got out of bed on my own accord half the ward would gasp in disbelief, with the other half wondering what the fuck I was doing and shoo me urgently back under the covers. If by some miracle I made it past security... I mean the nurses station, the hospital would go on full lock down, with every available nurse, doctor, anaesthetist, phlebotomist, dental hygienist and Jim from bed seven in hot pursuit.
Needless to say having space and freedom was a necessity in a quick recovery. You can imagine my sheer adulation as a nurse shook me awake at 3.30 in the morning, telling me they needed the bed and I had to pack up my shit and vacate the ward immediately. They'd had an emergency and was having someone come up from A&E to ICU, so had to move someone from ICU to my bed in HDU, then move me to the ward, where the person in the ward was probably kicked out into the dark, cold streets or booked in to the nearest Premier Inn with full continental breakfast and extra chocolates on the pillows under the hospitals personal cheque book. (This is not an exaggeration as I have indeed spent many a night in a Premier Inn courtesy of the Bristol Royal Infirmity)
Its just one big game of dominoes, you just hope all the pieces fall down...
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