Take that, tonsils!

After all the trials and tribulations of Tuesday 14th, I was then de-tonsilled the very next day! All very last minute, we arrived in the waiting area at 8am, calculated that if I hadn't been called through by 11.30 they wouldn't have time to do it that day, and got on with knitting/reading. At 11.05 a nurse appeared and said "They want you in theatre NOW!" so I hurtled through to the ward, was given a bed, changed into a gown, oops we haven't given you a pre-med, oh well, never mind and walked through to theatres. I walked into the Anaesthetic room at 11.20! (this is a much better way to do it, as all the lying round on a bed wearing a theatre gown the day before had made me nervous!)

It was a little frustrating on the walk through, as you get to go past the anaesthetic rooms of all (10) theatres, all of which were in action and all of which looked interesting. I'd had to leave my glasses behind at the ward as I can see well enough without them to read my consent form so I couldn't really see what was going on and I'd have loved to be nosy and have a gawp in through the doors on the way past. Everybody was really nice and friendly in anaesthetics and talked me through what was going on (possibly I wasn't supposed to ask so many questions?). I came round in the Recovery Room at 12.15 (although when I read my notes the next day it was actually 11.58, but it took until 12.15 for me to remember how to tell the time), so the whole operation only took about 30 minutes!

Then I was wheeled back to the ward, but onto a different bay, which was a little confusing. I'd had my bed re-allocated whilst I was in theatre! It was in my favour though, as I'd started out in a bay with 3 men, and ended up in one with 3 other women! I felt pretty grim by then as I'd had plenty of morphine in Recovery and then discovered back on the ward that morphine makes me spew! LOVELY. I ended up being kept in hospital that night (it should have been day surgery) because I hadn't managed to eat anything but the night was enormous fun! We were all relatively young in my bay and it was a bit like having a pyjama party as we swopped our cancellation horror stories and kept getting the giggles. Two of the others were waiting for surgery the next day and the other one had just come out of theatre like me. The next morning Georgina, who had come in at 8am on Wednesday just like me and had waited for surgery on her kidney for the whole day before being found a bed for the night in my bay, had her operation cancelled 10 minutes before she was due into theatre. An emergency had come in and taken the High Dependency bed she might have needed when she came out of theatre.

On Thursday I got some Rice Krispies down and was discharged just before lunch. Mum borrowed a wheelchair to push me the 20 metres (!) home from the ward, which was a little scary when she insisted on going down the middle of the road rather than on the pavement. And that was it, really, for the next 10 days or so. I'd been warned I'd feel increasingly worse for the following 4-7 days (that's SO encouraging when you've just come out of theatre), and this was very true, as by the weekend I'd never felt so crap in my life. It's settled down a lot since, and now just feels like having tonsillitis. You're also warned to eat rough foods such as toast and bran flakes as this keeps the throat clean and helps prevent infection. That advice actually worked really well, and, although people kept talking about ice cream I really wasn't tempted by it, I think it would have felt really clogging and definitely wouldn't have helped clean my throat! Mum provided some great meals and I managed to eat quite a variety, which I think helped the recovery and meant I didn't lose too much weight, thank goodness. It was really slow progress though, as it was taking an hour every morning just to eat a bowl of porridge! Anyway, it's going OK. I saw my GP for the 7 day follow-up last week and everything is healing well and he told me to stay off work for another fortnight (damn!) to make sure it's healed properly.

And, what did I get up to whilst lolling round at home? Well, I read a pile of books, watched some films and did plenty of knitting. (I also knitted in hospital, although knitting with a cannula in is bloody difficult!). It was quite entertaining at first as I had trouble concentrating and remembering things and it took a few days to regain the ability to multi-task (eeek, is that what it's like being a man?!). The knitting update will have to wait as I'm still at Mum's house on pay-as-you-go dial-up so can't upload pics but this is what I read:

"The Conjuror's Bird" by Martin Davies. This is a fun and interesting read, and reminds me a lot of "Possession" by A.S. Byatt (but a third the length and without vast chunks of "Victorian" poetry). It's all about the hunt for a taxidermy specimen supposedly brought back by Sir Joseph Banks intertwined with two love stories set at different times (see, I did say it was like "Possession") and the characters spend quite a lot of time rattling around Lincolnshire villages. There are chunks of truth in the story, especially about Banks' expeditions. The author has NO idea of the differences between a librarian and an archivist though (honestly, humph!).

Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean. The sequel to Peter Pan, commissioned by Great Ormond St Hospital in order to keep the royalties flowing. I didn't really enjoy this one much (although I read it when my brain was most anaesthetic/morphine addled which probably didn't help) and I never really "got" Peter Pan when I was younger anyway. However, the story rattles along (if slightly confusingly, but that might be the morphine) and lots of old characters come back and some new ones who don't turn out to be very new after all. And it's printed in a big typeface which is excellent when your brain doesn't work well.

"Theodora's Baby" by Penny Culliford. Sequel to Theodora's Diary and Theodora's Wedding and continues much in the same vein. It is very funny, and isn't intended to be taken seriously (ie perfect post-op reading). I did get slightly annoyed by the lack of research (there's one point where the vicar is talking about something that happened at theological college which just couldn't have as the C of E would never have allowed the person concerned through a selection conference and into theological college in the first place! For a start she'd have been too young.) But then, it is a book that's meant to be silly and make you laugh more than anything else. which it does. And thanks to Anne for sending me it, and Theodora's Wedding, to read!

"Mr Phillips" by John Lanchester. A man is made redundant, can't bring himself to tell his family and spends the day wandering around London, pretending he's been at work all day. It reminds me a lot of "If nobody speaks of remarkable things" by Jon Mcgregor(another book, like "Possession", that I loved) because it's all about noticing the things that go on all the time that nobody normally notices. Mr Phillips wanders around, mainly thinking about sex, and a few things happen, but that's not really the point. Anyway, I thought it was quite cool, and one of those books that makes you think more about lots of things.

And I'm still in the middle of reading "After the Victorians" by A.N. Wilson and "Knitting" by Anne Bartlett.

Films? Well, I watched a few of the good old Colin Firth standbys, and also had a selection from my rental list at Lovefilm, which included some of season two of "Spooks" (a current addiction, but I only started watching Spooks last year on TV so I've got some catching up to do), "Birth", which is about reincarnation when a 10-year-old turns up claiming to be Nicole Kidman's dead husband, just as she's about to marry again. I rather enjoyed this one, it was another one that made my brain do some work. Unfortunately my laptop didn't like it which made watching it hard work as the computer kept crashing! Think I'll have to get it out again once I'm back home to see whether I missed anything. And "Amen", about the Church's ineffectualness (is that a word?) about doing anything about the Holocaust despite knowing what was going on. I originally saw this at the cinema when it came out (the wonderful Picturehouse cinema in Exeter, when I was working in the city in 2001) and it's excellent. Quite quite scary, as you watch the trains repeatedly running across the screen, knowing they're taking more and more people to be killed, and the desperation of the men who know more are being sent to their deaths and are trying to get the word out, but are repeatedly ignored. When I originally saw it the Catholic church stood out as the main culprit, knowing full well what was going on, but refusing to stand up to Hitler, but on viewing again, the Protestant church didn't come out much better either. But then again, I doubt very much that I'd have had the guts to do much about it had I been in a position to warn people then.

Golly, this is a long post! Congratulations if you've made it to the end! And thank you to everyone who left a comment on my last post. I have replied to some, but I'm very behind with emails and comments at the moment, and I think it'll take until next summer to catch up on reading blogs...