Finally we get a look in at the Oscar hopeful and career defining epic film Boyhood. Andrew takes a look at The Boxtrolls. 22 Jump Street & Chef get a thorough assessment. The Captive gets a look in. The classic this week is Drugstore Cowboy.
I was recently in hospital for a week with some vague problems - spine pain, abdominal pain, falling off a toilet pain. This is the second time in my life that I have spent an extended period of time in hospital. That was ten years ago, and now things have changed a bit. This is a rundown of five things I noticed in hospital.
5. Swearing at Strangers
One of the blissful and joyful things about an emergency room is you get to see a group of people under pressure trying to be nice to a bunch of people in pain or discomfort or hit by a bus who inevitably will start swearing at them or asking them for a cup of tea. I'm a relatively easy patient - well, I think I am - so had dealt with my unattended pain level for quite a bit as someone had been hit by a bus and the lady next to me simply needed to have her cup of tea and talk about the time she was in a Rolls Royce in Birmingham in the 1940's.
Eventually a nurse came along and gave me some oral pain relief. Keep in mind I hadn't eaten at all that day except for an iced coffee some fourteen hours earlier. I swallowed the tablets with some water and waited for the right effects. A minute or two later a junior doctor came along to collect some blood. My blood pressure was down so he had failed to get it from my right elbow and tried from my hand. The first time he tried it hurt like hell, and he couldn't get it in. The second time - so third try - he went for gold. It hurt like a motherfucker and I tried to not scream, but I did. At the same time that empty stomach started going 'nope, we don't want this pain relief in here, no thanks, get. it. out'.
I yelled for a vomit bag, swore at someone trying to give me some more water, said a few fucks at the doctor for not getting the cannula in properly. Once the cannula was in and the vomiting had passed I apologised to the doctor, although he apologised as well.
Once I'd been moved to my first ward there was a blind man there who had fallen and hit his head and kept blanking out on where he was. Every half hour or so he'd start yelling 'WHERE THE FUCK AM I' as loud as possible. A nurse would come running, remind him where he was, what had happened, how he'd gotten there. At which point he'd shout 'WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU'. I thought it was a good tactic and he certainly got attended to in a timely manner.
4. Woken up a 2am
Part of the constant care that the nurses provide in a hospital is checking your temperature, your blood pressure and your pulse. Not always in that order. What's the point of checking temperature when the pulse isn't working? Every couple of hours a different nurse would come around, strap a blood pressure strap on your arm and stick a thermometer in your mouth and then talk to you. Without fail, the nurses would always start asking me how I was as soon as they stuck the thermometer in.
One of the things that you don't realise when you finally get to sleep at nine at night in a sea of sweat is that they're going to wake you up again in a few hours to check your temperature, pressure, pulse. And if you're lucky, give you drugs. One night, on the other side of the room, an elderly man who was having troubles with his back and keeping medication down had gotten a suppository. There were a few other people in the room and because the old man was fairly deaf, the African nurse who was helping him spoke loudly about how's she's 'going to give you a suppository now Mr Harlock'. The man was audibly surprised when the suppository arrived.
Just as surprised as I was when a minute or two later the curtain opened and the nurse came through. Now, I have nothing wrong with anybody being a nurse, however, dress appropriately for the job. This lovely lady had a huge purple head dress on with big dangling ear rings hanging down. She looked like she had struggled to get her scrub top over her bouffant-ish dress so it had only gotten half way up her sleeve. She slapped on some new gloves, stuck a thermometer in my mouth, strapped on the blood pressure cuff, held my wrist and asked me, how you doing?
3. All Sorts of Pain Relief
Part of my problem was some excruciating back pain. I have high iron levels in my liver and was advised originally that I couldn't take any pain relief, so I hadn't. On my arrival and subsequent stay in hospital, I was asked on a scale of one to ten what my pain level was. It was at about a seven or eight for most of the time. Fortunately enough, alongside the panadol I was given, I also had synthetic morphine. It was the first time - and hopefully not the last time - that I have had morphine in my life. Besides making my nose itch an awful lot, it was very very worthwhile.
When I moved into a different ward later on, there was another man in there with possible tumour. He was given regular opioids to help with his pain level - something that (from the sound of his TV) made watching Pixar films very enjoyable.
2. Pee, Pee Everywhere
Given I couldn't walk very well to start off with - what with the falling down from a toilet thing and all that - I was stuck in an uncomfortable hospital bed. After getting fluids and a bunch of cups of water, well, my bladder had filled up quite a bit. Now, being a man it was made pretty easy to pee into a bottle. Not a hard thing to do. I can't begin to imagine how it would be to pee into this weirdly awkward bottle as a woman.
One of the people in a room I was in asked for a new bottle every night. Now, he could get up and go to the toilet perfectly fine, and in fact his bed was closest to the toilet so it was easiest for him to get to the toilet. However, every night, he'd pee in the bottle and ask for the nurse to take it away. It's smart laziness. However, also slightly disturbing that this man was quite happy to empty his bladder in a room with three other people in it every night. Fortunately enough I think enough people had abstained from having the hospital food that they didn't need to worry about number two's. Unless...
1. Open Your Bowels
Every morning a nurse would come around at about seven am and ask you how you're feeling, take your blood pressure, temperature, all that stuff. And then ask you, have you opened your bowels lately? It sounds like something that Joe Cocker could have sung once, 'have I told, you lately, that I, opened my bowels'. It took me a day or two to understand completely that the question meant, hey, have you had a shit recently? Now, I know that it's not easy to ask people, you had a dump today? But it caught me off guard when I was asked about opening my bowels.
It's not something I'd ever really thought about before, and now I know it it's slightly changed my world in a way. 'Just need to go open my bowel's, be right back.' There's something about hearing a fellow patient who needs assistance to go to the toilet be asked 'do you need to pee, or do you need to open your bowels?' The 'do you need to pee' sounds very strine, whereas the 'or do you need to open your bowels' sound very regal, very English. Yet, at the same time, open your bowels sounds as filthy as someone saying, 'I gotta take a dump'. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As for how I'm feeling now? Well, I'm better, but not. Still have back pain, still have abdominal pain, and still have night fevers (which is not as good as The Bee Gee's have suggested it would be). Still opening my bowels.
