Opinion
Better off hypochondriac than a complacent corpse
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
My friend Soldier Boy is in hospital. Five days ago he woke up with the worst pain he’d ever endured and headed off to A &E, where he was admitted with a suspected kidney stone.
After being told to fast, so that they could operate on him, he slept the first night on a trolley in A&E’s corridor (correction: he didn’t sleep, because he was on a trolley in A&E’s corridor!) since which he’s been on a ward, fasting every day, hoping that the operation might happen.
At 9pm each day the doctor has come around and told him that the operation wouldn’t be happening that day, so he doesn’t need to fast any more, but he has to fast from midnight as they might operate on him the next day. Soldier Boy then has three hours to try to eat something, after the hospital kitchen is closed.
For the first few days he was quite understandably in a rage, but now he seems accepting of the process.
“I’m in a washing machine, Charlie. I have to wait for the end of the cycle.”
I have been a very poor visitor, my platitudes feeding his rage, his rage making me wish I wasn’t there.
At the age of 17 I spent six weeks on an orthopaedic ward, after snapping both my femur and tibia in two. Hospital days start early, then seem to drag on forever. You dream of the calm and quiet of the night but, when darkness finally falls, one of the patients on your ward throws a crazy fit and robs your sleep, until you’re longing for the daylight again.
For a while I was that crazy guy. They put me on four-hourly morphine injections which had me screaming shouting crying out in opiate-fuelled delirium. I felt as if I was clinging to the ceiling, looking down on the ward.
After a few days one of the lads further down the ward told me that there was a plot to kill me. Driven demented by my explosive vocals, the other patients had decided that if I didn’t shut up at night, there’d be one morning when I might not wake up.
Incentivised somewhat by that vital little sliver of info, I refused to take any more painkillers. I was going be in pain for months anyway, so I might as well get used to it.
What seemed to a teenager like a singularly sensible and conveniently macho decision has taken its toll on my life, because during the ensuing weeks, I built a tolerance to pain that has ill-served me.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune