Pre-Discharge Discharge
Date: 10/11/2015,
Categories:
Taboo
Author: PervyStoryteller
I was actually quite relieved to be given a room of my own. The ward I’d been on following my operation had been a depressing place. There’d been three other men there, none of whom made great conversation partners. One of them was three-quarters deaf and had apparently left his ear trumpet at home. Just as you’d dozed off, you could rely on one of the nurses bellowing out loud about the need for him to take his medication, have yet more blood drawn, or have his catheter seen to. Another man was, as far as I could ascertain, an ostensibly recovering addict of some kind, who spent his time curled up in the foetal position when he wasn’t applying for frequent doses of morphine. I wasn’t even sure he should be on the ward. His condition appeared to be a sequence of endless complications. The third man just stared perpetually into space, and it seemed almost rude to interrupt whatever was playing out in his head. The procedure I had was an embarrassing one, which I won’t go into detail about. I was supposed to be kept in for a couple of days for observation, but as I laid there doing nothing, an infection took hold. Truth be told, I hardly noticed anything was wrong, but the nurses were all concern, and eventually the same doctor who had earlier assured me I would “soon feel like a new man” (nudge nudge, wink wink), decided that a longer stay was required, and that in a room of my own, lest I unleash pestilence on the other patients and/or the outside world. But however much of a ...
... relief it was to get away from the ward, I was still bored rigid. A thoughtful nurse provided me with some tattered paperbacks I would never dream of reading if I’d had any choice in the matter. Rushed visitors provided newspapers that in turn provided the usual litany of woe. Endless hours were spent solving Sudoko puzzles and crosswords. The only light relief came when one or other of the nurses arrived to perform some new test or stick a needle somewhere. People can go on all they like about how bad the health care system is, but I won’t have anything said against the nurses, who are quite possibly the most consummate professionals I’ve come across in any sphere of working life. They were of course as dispassionate as you get; some more cheerful than others, some you could joke with, others were exclusively focused on my vitals. I found a number of them attractive, but it seemed inappropriate to flirt – and since my original condition still apparently required daily monitoring of my private parts, any attempt in that direction really would have been in the worst possible taste, and probably quite rightly have been met with a steely refusal to play the game. In any case, in spite of the doctor’s bullish prediction, I felt sure it would take a while longer before I started feeling like the same man I was before, let alone a new one. My main concern was simply to be released, so that I could read what books I liked, stream what music I liked, and generally start to feel like ...