Back in 2005, I made a doctors appointment as I wasn’t feeling too well. I had a pain in my lower stomach.
He referred me to the hospital. They did various scans and tests, including shoving a camera up the one place you really don’t want it to go. All the doctors looked a bit upset and told me if I hadn’t visited the Doc’s I would have ended up having a catheter and bag fitted for the rest of my life. Not groovy…
“You need surgery.” he says.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
So that kind of put me on the back foot… but work were quite good about it. I had the surgery, and had a week off to recover, then shortly after something inside of me went “pop”.
I started bleeding and it didn’t stop. After an hour of waiting for it to calm down (and it didn’t) I phoned A&E and they got an ambulance out to me. On arriving at the hospital, it all started going a bit wrong…
The bleeding was internal, and so it didn’t hurt. Until the guys at A&E decided the best way to stop it was to put a catheter in me and tape me up with a load of dressings. This forced the blood to go somewhere else which hurt like hell.
12 hours later and I’m under observation, and still pumping blood out. Not good. Repeated attempts to ask the staff what will happen when I’ve no more left fell on deaf ears. Apparently; the Doctors know best. I did the maths based on how much I’d lost (the little absorbent pads tell you on the label how much they’ll hold) and how much your body holds, and figured things would get interesting very soon.
3am, Sunday morning, in a hospital bed. My head feels like its fizzing and I feel sick. The room looks like its at the little end of a telescope, and I’m looking in the big end. I rang the nurse bell.A young nurse comes up, and I tell her I’m feeling odd; sort of a 50/50 between passing out or throwing up. She then surprised the hell out of me.
She turned on the light, pushed some button above my head and ran off! Things went black then, but I remember being distinctly annoyed at being abandoned.
I woke up and there must have been about 15 people round the bed. I was on on my side, shaking, retching, with various fluids going into me. My heart was going like the clappers, but there wasn’t much pressure on the clock.
My parents had been rung, and told in no uncertain terms, to make haste for the Hospital if they wanted a quick chat before I checked out.
Turns out, the hospital had nearly let me bleed to death. During the op, they had gone a bit deep, and just relied on my body to heal itself. It very nearly had… but then the strain had been too much.
What saved me was the low blood pressure when I ran low. Where the wound was inside me got the chance it needed to start healing, as there was very little pressure to keep it open. What annoyed me further was the doctors wanted to go in me again to see what had gone wrong. They were told very strongly to leave me alone.
It took me the better part of a couple of months to come back to any kind of strength after that.
Far too close for my liking… cheers NHS.
Rich
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