Operational Hazards

Dear Fam and friends,

Firstly, my love and thanks to all of you for your warmth and concern. So many messages, calls and visits, I feel your love from all corners lifting and helping me. It is almost tangible and I am humbled. Thank you.

I am feeling much, much better and sometimes think what a fuss I have been making and maybe it wasn’t so bad looking back. Or maybe it was.

Managed to get my homework done for the Crejat Academie and Merel will take it in while I am indisposed. The task was a landscape using colour perspective in a pointillist style of the post-impressionists. Er…

We decided that as I would be in hospital in a few days, we would have a very quiet Saint Nicolas, with just the four of us. Snow has come upon us, but Bernadet has been keeping our paths free. In deference to my lack of appetite, we decided on a cheese fondue and a little wok for prawns and chinky veggies. It was wonderful. Therafter, we suffered the worlds longest game of Monopoly, about five hours. Bernadet let herself go bankrupt quite quickly, but the stalwarts Merel and Emma would not give in. I had three sides of the board covered in hotels, but still they would negotiate ridiculous deals. It was all great fun, and knowing where I would be in a day or two, very close and emotional.

I have been in the MCA for 6 days, and will try to describe the best moments, but I fear there were few, apart from the visits. My kids know that I always try to dig out the funny side of sober situations for my own amusement, and to give them the stuff by which they measure my state of mind, but without hiding the facts. We arrived on Thursday at 7.am, a hospital being a working factory and operations begin at 8 sharp and there is no need to have someone lying around on holiday for more than an hour before the knives go in. I was actually looking forward to all this as it would give me some respite from the effects of the previous treatments. My irradiated bum was, in places, devoid of skin and could not be sat on, but stuck to my undies and had to be separated from them again with gritted teeth. Worse was the stinging diarrhea. At first I called on the Lord, shouting Jesus Christ over and over again, asking Him to reveal His plan. Later I discovered the technique of counting. All things have a finite time. Only 8 radio sessions to go, only 3 radio sessions to go. The worst acid diarrhea session took a count of 50, so all I had to do was count up to 50 and the burning would be bearable. It works.

Thrust into a room in which a chap of about my age and two women were already established. Things move quickly here as I would find out, and the room would be re-colonised several times before I would leave this place. No time to get acquainted before the curtain is drawn round the bed and a rather stunning Indonesian nurse with a flower in her hair called Eileen (I mean the nurse was called Eileen, not the flower. I was confused as it all went so fast).  She hustled me out of my clothes, dressed me in a little green jacket and asked my birth date. They always ask your birth date to make sure they have the right person. I suggest a photo would be quicker. Then something very odd. Someone loomed over me with a thick green marking pen and said they had to mark an arrow on my belly so that the surgeon would know which kidney to take out. Did I agree that this was the right kidney, as the pen hovered over my right side. I was stunned. I did not know, in all the consultations over the weeks before, which kidney was OK and which had a tumor the size of a grapefruit. I dithered from left to right and the pen dithered with me.  Did he mean right as opposed to wrong, or right as opposed to left, and from my viewpoint the right kidney is on my right, but from his….. Er, I think it’s this one. Well, you have to make a decision don’t you, and time was being wasted looking at valuable watches. It’s a 50/50 thing, and just before I went under from the narcotics, I thought what if they got the wrong one. Er, sorry, we took out the wrong one. But then one doctor says  to another ‘Who made the choice?’ A forest of eyes and a hand with a thick green marker point towards me. Look, I cry, I’m an organ donor, I carry the card. You can give me my own kidney back! It’s a perfect match. Sorry old chap, you’re at the bottom of the list. Could be years…..

And then I woke up. And wished I hadn’t.  This was supposed to be a keyhole operation. Couple of holes and then the tubes with the little chromium robots go in and everybody clusters round the plasma screen while the top cutter shows his skill with the joystick and the offending organ is sucked out through a tube of 4 cm max. Probably done in two hours and you can be back at work after lunch. He explained later that things didn’t go quite as planned because I bled profusely at the first cut, something that could not have been predicted. My blood, my fault. Bernadet had the feeling that there had been a lot of panic in the operation. Anyhoo, I awoke and felt as if I were lying in the desert. My mouth and lips were dry and hard. I could move my arms but when I touched my side, a set of hot needles went through me. I felt a row of fishhooks about 20 or 30 cm long which turned out to be staples, the modern stitch. It all felt like a band-saw blade embedded in me. There were pipes and tubes all over me. One came out of my belly, ‘the drain’,and was leaking unmentionable fluids into my bed and some of it went through the tube into a bag. Two pipes went into my arm, one for sustenance and the other for morphine. The nurse came and said that I could push a button to get a shot of morphine. The button would then be inactive for 5 minutes. Three pipes went into my nose. Two for oxygen, and the third went into my stomach to suck up any fluid. I was not allowed to eat or drink for two days. Another thick rubber tube went over my left thigh, and I lifted it up to see where it went. My willy went up in the air and got longer. Oh god, not that! Not a willy-pipe! Later I would walk around carrying my urine-bag to the wash-room nodding at other patients some of whom were pushing long poles on wheels with multiple bags of fluids going in and out. I lost most of my pipes and bags before I was allowed out of bed. There is a status involved, A one-bag man lowers his eyes and gives way as he defers to a four bag, two pole general strutting past. But that was later. The only comfort for the next day and a half was a little lollipop stick with a small sponge that I could dip into a glass of water to wet my lips which were covered in transparent scales. The male nurse said everything was dry because I was breathing through my mouth and not my nose. I closed my mouth but could not breathe because of all the tubes stuffed up my nostrils. I spent most of my time listening to Talking Books on my I-pod. Particularly Slaughterhouse Five This is the story of Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier in WW2 who is picked up by aliens and then spends the rest of the book going forwards and backwards in time. My I-pod is not working properly, and starts at a different place every time it is re-started. I did not notice as I thought this is just Billy going backwards and forwards in time. When he became the Mayor of Casterbridge I began to suspect. So it goes. I learnt very quickly not to drink any water. I would vomit, and the fishhooks would bite. And the ‘pain-pump’ with its little button that went green when another shot was allowed would be scrabbled for. Actually, the morphine doesn’t stop the pain, it just makes you so stoned that you don’t really care about it. The morphine tube eventually fell out and could not be replaced anyway, by which time I could take normal pain-killers. Washing was a problem when immobile. One stinks of urine and sweat, both with that awful chemo smell, plus all the other stuff that leaks from various pipes. It is not nice to be with oneself, but one is trapped in one's web of tubes. The lovely Eileen asked if I wanted to do my own naughty bits after washing most of me. I told her that I was by this time beyond all embarrassment and what did it matter, as she was watching anyway. Things gradually improved until I could sip water, then soup, yoghurt and finally bread with cheese or meat and, just before I left, full meals. The catering is superb. One just fills up a formula with a wide range of goodies. And it will be wheeled in, hot and delicious. The social life with the other inmates and with ones visitors also improves. I cannot say that all the nursing staff were as nice as Eileen. I complained that the skin was off my bum and one of them put a plastic skin over the area. It was too small, and began to contract inwards and roll up. I told the nurse that it was very painful, so the nurse ripped it off and walked away. I would have hit the roof if I were not tied down with tubes. The old chap next to me was very grateful to borrow my packet of magazines donated by Karolientje and Bauke. Top Gear and Science Magazine on either side of a variety of shady stuff with the accent on scantily clad maidenry. I have had so many visits I cannot thank you all enough for coming to cheer me up, even when it must have been totally boring to just sit there with me zonked out. I jokingly told Adam, who inquired what all the pipes were for, that one was to push extra oxygen up my nose through a little blue sponge. I said that if I put in my ear, I could hear the sea. It kept falling out and needed stuffing up again. Later that night I was rudely awakened and asked to account for the oxygen pipe in my ear. One of the ladies was released, to be replaced by a chap of 95, a lively old boy who looked just like Richard Briars.  He was here for a ‘man’s problem’, the prostate, and was just so full of life. He bellowed against his own willy tube, saying he wanted to pee and would not believe that the bag full of pee was his. He was always hungry, and at the first visit after his op, he ate a hearty meal and then sent his daughter to the snack-bar for meat balls and stuff. Gradually all the pipes disappeared. The last was the willy-pipe, which goes all the way in to the bladder where it is held in place by a little balloon at the end of the pipe. Take a deep breath, count to three and then exhale, said the pretty nurse as she took a firm grip. On 2 she yanked, and my willy went very long and very thin. There was a sound of parting elastic and we were separated. Hoorah!

The morning that I left, a rather frightening near-miss occurred. The doctor had said that I would be prescribed laxative drinks to help me now that I was eating normally but still with a gut tumor causing a partial blockage. My breakfast arrived, and I noticed a plastic bottle on my table where my breakfast tray was placed. That must be the laxative drink. I opened it. It smelled foul. As I went to dink it, I noticed a red square with a round blob with an X under it.  Like a little red pirate flag. I passed the bottle to the girl next to me to read the label as my reading glasses were still in my bag. She said it was a chlorine based cleaning fluid and called the nurse. The nurse said that it was hers and put it back in the chemical cupboard. Silly me, she said and went out again. I dressed very quickly and packed my bag, not without some shaking, and just sat waiting for Bernadet to collect me. Bernadet came with a box of chocolates for the nurses, but there was panic. Someone in the next room needed reviving and everyone was running around. We went to the counter to leave the chocolates for the busy nurses. There a nurse was putting a lot of equipment back into a case. She told another that they had sent to another department for another apparatus, because this one is missing the tube that connects…….. My last impression before leaving was of men and women in white coats looking sheepish and staring at their feet.

Well, I will be back there in a month or so. I will certainly take care, as I hope will the MCA.


One of the weeks highs, a visit by Tony and lovely Elli for a meal and a bit of Ricky Gervais Live. Merel and I had started our homework for the Crejat Academie, a still life. Merel did not get very far, so Elli asked if she could complete it. It is rather good in a pre-raphaelite post-impressionist pointillistic cubist sort of way. I will put a photo here when I get it back from the Crejat. 

Love you all but my fingers are tired. I cannot mention all the many names that have brought me comfort in this time. God bless all of you.


Spike