Oral Morphine

 In the big bottom drawer by my bed at home are the boxes.  These are my stacked supply of prednisolone in 5 mgs and 1 mgs tabs, dozens, enough to de-polymyalgia a whole street.  The boxes are dated and aging.  I haven’t touched them since my dose rate dropped to zero.  They are the reserve, held against the pains returning.  I should take them back to the pharmacy but they are my psychological prop. 

In the drawer by my bed where I am now there is no prednisolone.  In fact there is not even a drawer, just a mobile cabinet containing my clothes  with a box of Kimberly-Clark Professional Tissue sitting on its top.  In style these  are hygienic  regulation NHS.  In reality they are little different from the serviettes offered to me last week at Lobster & Burger in Hills Street.  No printed menu, three items only served, same price for each, all of them containing lobster. 

I’m in an otherwise empty side ward at the back of the being rebuilt Short Stay Surgical Unit.  The corridor outside is sealed with plastic sheeting  held in place with gaffer tape.  This is the University Hospital of Wales, built in 1971 and now showing signs of wear.  I’ve taken oral morphine, given to me in a self-dosing syringe.  It’s put a great bank of soft glory between me and the pain.  The catheter with its bloody bag recedes into the clouds.  The ceiling glows.

I’ve been under having samples taken from inside my bladder and several tumours  removed.  I’ve no idea how long I was in there.  One minute I’m talking to the anaesthetist who is administering dope into the cannula inserted in my wrist  and next I’m seeing two versions of everything in post op.   Now I’m languishing in that half world between crisp reality and the safe haven of fog. 

The night rolls.  I drift  through it.  At 3.00 am in the near distance an alarm sounds and the winking equipment around me flickers off before coming back on.  Fire alarm.   I realise in the total dark that there’s not much I can do about this, secured as I am to the bed by tubes and drips and full  with somnambulant drugs.  I call but no one hears.  I reach for my phone and try to check current UHW status on the UHW web site.  Nothing.  There’s an emergency phone number.  I ring that, at least I think I do.  No one answers.  I search for things like “what to do in hospital when there’s a fire” and “large building evacuation procedures” and finally “how to get down a corridor with a catheter inserted into your old man”.  The results I pull up all suggest that help will come.  It doesn’t.

I’m worried, I suppose I am but the dope takes off the edge.  The alarm which has rung for at least half an hour suddenly  silences.  They’ve put the fire out.  The alarm system itself has been consumed in a conflagration.  I’m in heaven on the other side.  One of those.  Eventually a nurse carrying a torch turns up to check on me.  “You alright love? ”  I nod.

The following day, which is not long in arriving, the staff nurse reviews my case.  The catheter is removed.  “There’ll be a bit of sensation as this comes out.” Jeez and a half.  The deal is that so long as there is someone with me and so long as I can lie down and be looked after for a few days I can go.  That and the fact that I am able to pee again.  Sounds so easy doesn’t it? 

Down at the SSSU latrines, one working, two out of commission, one with a sign up showing that it is currently being cleaned, I get into the queue.  There are two blokes in front of me both aged beyond, using the walls for support and generally looking terrible.  Once it’s my turn I stare at myself in the mirror.  I look pretty much the same.

Pee is beyond me.  I return to my bed dispirited and depressed.  The nurse advises drinking more.   “That’s the answer.” I’ve already done two jugs of water and four polystyrene cups of  hospital tea.  “Why don’t you go down to the concourse and have one of their giant coffees?  The walk will help.”

In the real world of the concourse, such as it is, everyone seems so business-like and aware.  I’m still full of fog.  I do a Grande something, hot brown liquid sold for an exorbitant price and then walk myself slowly back to the ward.  I join the latrine queue and manage a miserable eighth of a cup.  Nurse says no.  Not enough.  Drink more.  Keep trying.  She hands me another tea.  I can feel it, this flood of liquid, swilling around inside me.  I’m filling up like a tanker.

Eventually  after a few more failures there’s relief, of sorts, a trickle that the medical staff declare to be just about sufficient.   They need the bed, after all.  I’m clogging the system slowing   the flow of patients.  So long as I can just about cope I should go.

It takes a good two days before proper flow returns and a whole two weeks before the pain subsides.   It’ll happen again, I’m told.  These things, benign mostly, have an 80% likelihood of regrowth.  What causes them?  Exposure to certain chemicals, being Caucasian, getting older.  Two out three then.  Rock on.

SSSU: Short Stay Surgical Unit

Teeth

The pred levels are sinking.  I’m down to 3 mgs daily now and on such good and familiar terms with the wonder drug that I’ve dropped the nisalone bit from its name in favour of something more streetwise.  For now the polymyalgia is almost a memory although I’m sure its traces lurk down there in the dregs at the bottom of my bloods.  The new enemy, and one of considerable power,  is the spinal cyst. 

Looking at the dates on this blog it’s obvious that I have been severely distracted for several months.  The latter half of 2012 has gone by without comment.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that little happened during that time – the reverse in fact.  Between September 2012 and January 2013 I've been property developing, to live in rather than sell on. The opportunity presented itself last October so my partner and I went ahead.  We sold up and bought anew.  A big house with its own drive half-way up Penylan Hill.  Don’t underestimate the attraction of a drive.  In the Cardiff world where the car is king and the pavements thick with cyclists having a drive is a bit like owning a strip of 5mg prednisolone – salvation on hand whenever there’s a need.

With gusto we set the sell and buy circus in motion.  I have a dim memory of the last time I did this, way back in 1979. I swore then that because of the stress, expense and outrageous hassle I’d never do it again.  Why  in 2013, then,  have I decided to ignore those warnings from my younger self?

Out there in the world of land and property  is a line of essential organisations who need consulting, paying, obtaining permission from, paying, talking to, paying, obtaining clearance documents from, paying, and just for good measure, paying again.  The line stretches out to the horizon and the faces blur.  The mesh of commercial, legal, fiscal, and governmental interests, all acting with due diligence, comprehensive record-keeping, and a clearance fee on each occasion (to cover essential costs) out bleaks Bleak House.  The cash in the bank account whirls down towards zero.

In the middle of all this, with builders taking the floors out, new central heating going in and the internal water supplies being rerouted I decide to have my mouth repaired.  This is the latest episode in a long-term saga which I won’t bore you with here but suffice it to say that for several decades now I’ve been a regular at the local dentists with broken bicuspids, misaligned molars, contracting canines and collapsing crowns. On a good day I can fracture an incisor on a banana.   

At the Dental Hospital they’ve made the offer to rebuild and I’ve accepted.  This means six or more two-hour attendances, drilling, pulling, refacing and reinserting with I don’t know how many injections of lignocaine to help us along.  I’ve read Martin Amis’s recollections of his own time in the dental chair.  That's in Experience,  his 2000 autobiography and a book with a lot more going for it than many of his novels.  I should be prepared.

When I get to UHW  the car park is unaccountable cordoned off and closed.  I park a mile away and head in on foot.   The rain is coming down as only January ran can and the cyst is letting me know what the world is about.  Pain is coming up my right leg like jets of fire.  Half way there I have to stop and stuff my mouth with painkillers.  I’m carrying naproxen and heavy-dose co-codamol. For good measure, as the pain is wrapping itself round me like a poultice, I swallow an extra  5mg of pred.  Might help.  It’s an anti-inflammatory after all.

In the dental chair I’m floating.  I’m set out so that my head is lower than my feet and I’m injected on both sides.  I’m not sure which world I’m in.  To hell with what’s going on inside my mouth all know is that the leg pain is going and then, after time wobbles a bit, is gone. 

A couple of hours later I’m in the Japanese recovering.  This style of dining has been chosen for a) its freshness b) its lack of calories and, more importantly, c) its ability to deliver a decent full meal as a sort of non-tooth threatening mush.  Ramen – chicken bits and noodles.  Soft as a brush, just right.  I’ve a bottle of Sapporo (4.7%) in hand and a bowl of edamame  as an appetiser.  Around me there’s a  multi-cultural melee of young people chattering and eating while simultaneously  pushing  their fingers at their smart phones.  They are dining on raw fish and seaweed, udon doused in soy and crab’s legs coated in batter.  It's the modern way.

I go for broke and swallow another 5mg of Prednisone with the beer.  That should fix it.  The top of a back tooth snaps and comes away like pieces of badly-fixed render.  I’m unfazed.  This has happened so often before so why should I be?   I’m back at the Dental Hopsital in a week or so, they’ll sort it then.

More importantly the synovial cyst pain has gone back to that place where pain goes when it needs to recover its juices a bit.  A fog in my lower back.  It’ll hang there, hiding, and come back out to burn me again tomorrow.   But for now it isn’t with me.  Glory be.  What made it go?  Pred, NSAID,  pain-killer, dental injection, lying upside down, time, wishful thinking, prayer, luck, or beer?  One of those.