A Very Interesting Friday
May. 20th, 2018 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinThis isn't normally the sort of story I'd find much point in sharing, because it's all worked out fine so no one needs to be bothered with it. However, I find myself in the position of having to repeat it to everyone in my close acquaintance, so to save myself a little verbal legwork, I'm writing it down here. If you don't want to hear about food poisoning and a late night in an NHS hospital, feel free to skip this entry.
May 18th, 2018 was the 59th anniversary of Cherry's death.
The weather promised to be perfect, after a wet spring that has precluded a lot of good walking, and despite having been by a handful of times I'd never actually dropped in to Shaw's Corner (Cherry and George Bernard Shaw were friends and neighbours and visited frequently) so all the pieces were together for a grand day out. My walking buddy Sydney Padua, of Lovelace and Babbage fame, was up for it too – we'd done the circular walk which took in both Shaw's house and Cherry's grave last year and enjoyed it immensely, so a revisit was a welcome prospect.
From the train, on the way to our rendezvous at Welwyn Garden City, I saw an enormous plume of black smoke in the direction we were headed. This turned out to be a fire at an electrical goods warehouse in Hitchin (one of the towns on the way) but luckily didn't hinder the journey. Ordinarily this would be a tangential fact I'd leave out for irrelevance, but it does factor slightly into a later part of the story, so put it in your back pocket for now.
Syd and I set out from Welwyn in high spirits and good pace, and were soon out into the glory of the English countryside. I'd suggested doing the walk in reverse so as to have time to 'do' Shaw's Corner while it was open, which meant having lunch in Ayot rather than Wheathampstead. The house was very interesting and wonderfully peaceful – the Shaws certainly knew how to create a calm creative space. Then it was off down the lime avenue that led to where Cherry's house was before being torn down in the 1940s.
Around the time we got to Wheathampstead I was feeling as though I'd overdone it on lunch, though whether it was in quantity or the spiciness of the burger I couldn't tell. I paid Cherry my respects while Syd went in search of a coffee. She came back with a bottle of water for me and we set off on the last leg of the trail. It was on this stretch that I started feeling weird, so when she sat to sketch a bit, I lay down on some very comfortable grass and did some skygazing. The smoke from the Hitchin fire had caused a large gauzy cloud spreading westward, behind which the sun was now passing, and there were some very interesting atmospheric effects – a faint corona, and small sundogs sitting slightly outside the corona, which I'd never seen before, but most interesting of all was a small arc of reverse corona sitting well above the main one. Unfortunately I couldn't get it all into one photo, but here is roughly the arrangement:
After a short while here we moved on, but I started to feel distinctly weird and worried I might be sick, which I soon was, so we turned back toward Wheathampstead with the intent of taking a cab back to Welwyn instead of walking. I'm not sure if walking would have been a better idea but the cab ride was no fun at all, and on top of the nausea my hands and feet were going numb and buzzy, like when you touch a live wire. The buzz was getting worse and working its way up my arms and legs, and when I got out of the cab within sight of the station I sat down almost immediately, not trusting myself to walk anywhere. My hands and feet started to cramp up and the buzzy crampy feeling started in my mouth – I began to wonder if this was what a stroke felt like, or a seizure, but nothing weird was happening inside my head, I'd just lost control of most of my body. Syd called an ambulance, and by the time they got there whatever-it-was was starting to subside, but they took me in to get an ECG anyway and get the full story. They explained the buzzing cramps as an effect of hyperventilation, but the ECG turned up a small anomaly within the rhythm of the heartbeat so in the interest of caution they took me to hospital where I could get proper tests done and make sure it wasn't a subtle indication of something more seriously wrong.
And so began my first-hand NHS hospital experience. The NHS gets a lot of bad press (not to mention being slandered by certain US presidents), and the reasons for this are too complicated to go into here. I was, stereotypically, left in a corridor, but they moved me from a wheeled chair onto a proper trolley so I could lie down, and were always checking in on me and – most notably – always kind. It was late on a Friday night, there were quite a few demanding patients there, and as far as I could tell everyone was being treated with nothing but kindness and concern by staff who are notoriously under great strain. For an A&E ward I was, really, just taking up space, but if anyone resented me for it they didn't let it show in the slightest. They got me into an examination room when the more urgent cases allowed, then back out to the corridor to make room (only fair), then into another, less urgent room, when that opened up. Another ECG, and some blood samples, then a bit later the doctor came in and explained to me what they were looking at in the ECG and that preliminary blood tests hadn't turned up anything so he was going to send the samples for another set of tests. A few hours later these came back with nothing serious either, but in the meantime I got an IV to rehydrate me – let me tell you, at that moment I could not imagine anything so gloriously beautiful as that bag of saline glowing in the fluorescent light above me.
I was discharged around 4am. Syd had stayed with me the whole time despite my insisting she was free to go if she wanted, a suggestion she seemed to find ridiculous no matter how late it got. When it was clear we weren't going to make our last trains, she had booked us a couple rooms at a nearby hotel and ordered a cab to get us there when we finally left the hospital. And she stayed on in the morning until she was sure I could get back to Cambridge all right.
I didn't get to see any of the Royal Wedding on Saturday, as I was mainly in bed, getting all the rest I could. When I checked social media again in the evening, it was on fire with enthusiasm for the sermon:
For all that Saturday ended in a fug of discomfort, it allowed me a glimpse of that world where 'love is the way.' Friends and strangers being nothing but kind and self-sacrificing and thinking it completely normal – that is not normal, and I am grateful for every ounce of it. It was not necessary for Syd to stay, but she did. The hospital staff had every right to get me out of the way once they determined I was in no great risk, let me rehydrate on my own, not done the blood tests, not done the second blood tests, certainly not given me a room – but they did. Syd knows my gratitude, and will be reminded of it for some time to come. If HM Gov't decides to send me back to Canada I want to take the immigrant staff of Stevenage Lister Hospital with me (and the British junior doctor if he wants to come): they were all competent and lovely, despite the double burden of a distressed system and the bullying of the Home Office and popular discourse these days.
It was also a salutary reminder of our interconnectedness – I had considered doing the walk alone if Syd was unavailable, and if this had come upon me in the middle of a field outside Wheathampstead I don't know what I'd have done without her. Not to mention the ambulance and hospital staff, the hotel receptionist who checked us in at 4:15am, and all the other people who made a small drama less onerous than it might have been. Coming from a background of idealistic individualism, this lesson can never be driven home enough: we all need each other, we all affect each other, and we might as well be good to each other while we're at it. It can't hurt to try.
May 18th, 2018 was the 59th anniversary of Cherry's death.
The weather promised to be perfect, after a wet spring that has precluded a lot of good walking, and despite having been by a handful of times I'd never actually dropped in to Shaw's Corner (Cherry and George Bernard Shaw were friends and neighbours and visited frequently) so all the pieces were together for a grand day out. My walking buddy Sydney Padua, of Lovelace and Babbage fame, was up for it too – we'd done the circular walk which took in both Shaw's house and Cherry's grave last year and enjoyed it immensely, so a revisit was a welcome prospect.
From the train, on the way to our rendezvous at Welwyn Garden City, I saw an enormous plume of black smoke in the direction we were headed. This turned out to be a fire at an electrical goods warehouse in Hitchin (one of the towns on the way) but luckily didn't hinder the journey. Ordinarily this would be a tangential fact I'd leave out for irrelevance, but it does factor slightly into a later part of the story, so put it in your back pocket for now.
Syd and I set out from Welwyn in high spirits and good pace, and were soon out into the glory of the English countryside. I'd suggested doing the walk in reverse so as to have time to 'do' Shaw's Corner while it was open, which meant having lunch in Ayot rather than Wheathampstead. The house was very interesting and wonderfully peaceful – the Shaws certainly knew how to create a calm creative space. Then it was off down the lime avenue that led to where Cherry's house was before being torn down in the 1940s.
Around the time we got to Wheathampstead I was feeling as though I'd overdone it on lunch, though whether it was in quantity or the spiciness of the burger I couldn't tell. I paid Cherry my respects while Syd went in search of a coffee. She came back with a bottle of water for me and we set off on the last leg of the trail. It was on this stretch that I started feeling weird, so when she sat to sketch a bit, I lay down on some very comfortable grass and did some skygazing. The smoke from the Hitchin fire had caused a large gauzy cloud spreading westward, behind which the sun was now passing, and there were some very interesting atmospheric effects – a faint corona, and small sundogs sitting slightly outside the corona, which I'd never seen before, but most interesting of all was a small arc of reverse corona sitting well above the main one. Unfortunately I couldn't get it all into one photo, but here is roughly the arrangement:
After a short while here we moved on, but I started to feel distinctly weird and worried I might be sick, which I soon was, so we turned back toward Wheathampstead with the intent of taking a cab back to Welwyn instead of walking. I'm not sure if walking would have been a better idea but the cab ride was no fun at all, and on top of the nausea my hands and feet were going numb and buzzy, like when you touch a live wire. The buzz was getting worse and working its way up my arms and legs, and when I got out of the cab within sight of the station I sat down almost immediately, not trusting myself to walk anywhere. My hands and feet started to cramp up and the buzzy crampy feeling started in my mouth – I began to wonder if this was what a stroke felt like, or a seizure, but nothing weird was happening inside my head, I'd just lost control of most of my body. Syd called an ambulance, and by the time they got there whatever-it-was was starting to subside, but they took me in to get an ECG anyway and get the full story. They explained the buzzing cramps as an effect of hyperventilation, but the ECG turned up a small anomaly within the rhythm of the heartbeat so in the interest of caution they took me to hospital where I could get proper tests done and make sure it wasn't a subtle indication of something more seriously wrong.
And so began my first-hand NHS hospital experience. The NHS gets a lot of bad press (not to mention being slandered by certain US presidents), and the reasons for this are too complicated to go into here. I was, stereotypically, left in a corridor, but they moved me from a wheeled chair onto a proper trolley so I could lie down, and were always checking in on me and – most notably – always kind. It was late on a Friday night, there were quite a few demanding patients there, and as far as I could tell everyone was being treated with nothing but kindness and concern by staff who are notoriously under great strain. For an A&E ward I was, really, just taking up space, but if anyone resented me for it they didn't let it show in the slightest. They got me into an examination room when the more urgent cases allowed, then back out to the corridor to make room (only fair), then into another, less urgent room, when that opened up. Another ECG, and some blood samples, then a bit later the doctor came in and explained to me what they were looking at in the ECG and that preliminary blood tests hadn't turned up anything so he was going to send the samples for another set of tests. A few hours later these came back with nothing serious either, but in the meantime I got an IV to rehydrate me – let me tell you, at that moment I could not imagine anything so gloriously beautiful as that bag of saline glowing in the fluorescent light above me.
I was discharged around 4am. Syd had stayed with me the whole time despite my insisting she was free to go if she wanted, a suggestion she seemed to find ridiculous no matter how late it got. When it was clear we weren't going to make our last trains, she had booked us a couple rooms at a nearby hotel and ordered a cab to get us there when we finally left the hospital. And she stayed on in the morning until she was sure I could get back to Cambridge all right.
I didn't get to see any of the Royal Wedding on Saturday, as I was mainly in bed, getting all the rest I could. When I checked social media again in the evening, it was on fire with enthusiasm for the sermon:
For all that Saturday ended in a fug of discomfort, it allowed me a glimpse of that world where 'love is the way.' Friends and strangers being nothing but kind and self-sacrificing and thinking it completely normal – that is not normal, and I am grateful for every ounce of it. It was not necessary for Syd to stay, but she did. The hospital staff had every right to get me out of the way once they determined I was in no great risk, let me rehydrate on my own, not done the blood tests, not done the second blood tests, certainly not given me a room – but they did. Syd knows my gratitude, and will be reminded of it for some time to come. If HM Gov't decides to send me back to Canada I want to take the immigrant staff of Stevenage Lister Hospital with me (and the British junior doctor if he wants to come): they were all competent and lovely, despite the double burden of a distressed system and the bullying of the Home Office and popular discourse these days.
It was also a salutary reminder of our interconnectedness – I had considered doing the walk alone if Syd was unavailable, and if this had come upon me in the middle of a field outside Wheathampstead I don't know what I'd have done without her. Not to mention the ambulance and hospital staff, the hotel receptionist who checked us in at 4:15am, and all the other people who made a small drama less onerous than it might have been. Coming from a background of idealistic individualism, this lesson can never be driven home enough: we all need each other, we all affect each other, and we might as well be good to each other while we're at it. It can't hurt to try.
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Date: 2018-05-21 03:44 am (UTC)-K
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Date: 2018-05-21 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-05-26 10:54 pm (UTC)-- Melissa