catsaway in Hospital with Parkinson’s (again)
VGH March 24 - April 20, 2016
Well I was… home now, where I am regaining my
equilibrium (sort of) after a third-world-tarmac landing: floridly bruised
knees, non-concussed wall-banged head. I am resuming my connectedness to the
digital world (after the barest of Internet for 19 + 27 days)
The night I was admitted
for a second time (March 24, 2016), after the emptying of an agonizing
bladder-bursting litre of retained urine, and
a second litre from a subsequent catheter ordered by the Doctor (the ER nurse
had called me manipulative for having
begged for the 2nd release) lying in frozen sweat, my t-shirt
plastered to my body, I instructed* the ER care workers to just cut it off. I
insisted it wasn’t worth the effort to do otherwise… it was a plain white
cotton t-shirt, 21 of which I would come to own by the end of my 2nd
admittance (having quickly learned to reject the convenience of their tender
underarm grating polyester, naked butt exposing hospital gowns, as I had
previously learned to reject the seduction of their heated flannel sheets: a
few minutes of steamy bliss rapidly descending into hours of clammy sweating in
the frozen AC air).
*I would learn, eventually, that even polite and
respectful instruction as how best to
meet my specific pragmatic, not obviously-medical needs, was more often than
not, unwelcome and resented by most hospital staff. For pain I needed warmth
and mobility not drugs. And western Hospital treatment excludes (mostly) the Touchy Feely. I would experience one
truly extraordinary exception to that rule …
Though the ER care worker
cut off the t-shirt with neither argument nor resentment, the Higher-Ups would
later discharge me, declaring me “a poor candidate for in-patient care,
ill-suited for any Parkinson’s rehab program as I lacked goals and
determiniation”! And this for the crime of having made suggestions and asked questions
about how my return home would be prepared for – plus, perhaps, a few harmless
eccentricities which I’ll get to later…(hint: think overhead-spot-lit in the
otherwise-dark-ward topless, floppy-adult-diaper clad middle of the night post
pee celebrations of the joy of release from the frozen rigid immobility imposed
by the freezing AC – not Parkinson’s
“freezing”, as my current super-hero community nurse advised me to
distinguish).
