The slightly elderly gentleman came along nicely after his not very serious procedure. He sat up on his trolley, looked around in the recovery room and seemed quite pleased with things. There was an air of confidence about him. He was happy with himself and you got the feeling he had reason to be.
I greeted him and said that I was the one to take him up from theatres to the day surgery department, from where he would go home later.
“Good”, said the man, “Because I’m absolutely starving!”
We were waiting for the porter and got talking. Porters can take time to come and the rules stipulate you should be two people transporting a patient on a trolley. I have on occasions broken the rules and pushed myself but… People can get a bit nervous about that and as an agency nurse you better not make people too nervous. It’s bad for business.
So, I leant over the little bed side trolley full with nursing essentials like gauze, syringes, saline, tape and masks, and rested my elbows unprofessionally on his medical notes while we worked each other’s backgrounds out. We didn’t do very well. He couldn’t hear my Scandinavian twang and I didn’t realise he was a born and bred London boy. Well educated and spoken, he’d started his days in Westminster choir school “hated every minute of it” and had proceeded with having a fulfilling and successful life. Now, after his peak, he still sat on the board of something or other, looked after his property in the Italian countryside and was involved every week in a charity for care of carers a, as he said, “rather disadvantaged group in our society indeed”. He was the kind of good, old fashioned and generous conservative, that some people of today think don’t exist.
“So how’s NHS doing then”, I asked, still leaning on the trolley.
“Oh, not bad at all… I mean; This is nothing comparing to the knee!”
“You had your knee done?”
“Yes, about two years ago. God, that was painful!” He rubbed his knee in memory of the agony.
“Yes, I know; knees are bad”, I agreed.
“Yes, it certainly was, but yeah… No, not a bad experience in all… Well, apart from two things!” His hand moved up to correct the glasses, but instead started fingering on a piece of paper, a little sticker with his name on it that was attached to the glasses frame.
“Like what?”
“Well, first I had several things stolen out of my bag, so a bit of good old theft. That wasn’t very good, but what was worse was that the pain was so bad that I got Morphine and a lot of it. They sent me home with this liquid morphine bottle, Oromorph I think it was called, and I took that daily and it finished and I went to my GP and got more. I’d left the hospital in the end of November and by Christmas I was still taking it and suddenly one day, I started feeling really bad. I just wasn’t right and my clever daughter came and looked the situation over and said “Dad, you’ve got properly addicted to morphine! You’ve got to go cold turkey and get it over with. Now.” So I did, there and then. An awful ten days followed with shivers, colds, nausea, sickness and shakes. It was a horrible and terrifying experience, I almost thought I was dying, but eventually I got out of it and then it was like I was flying!” He retold his story matter-of-factly, detailed, descriptive and completely without self-pity.
“But what I don’t understand”, finished the man his story, “is why no one told me that these things happen.”
Yes, why indeed?
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