I, however, was busy being born, and so I missed it

Hospital discharge newsletter, with birthday greetings for Siouxsie Wiles and yet more help from my friends

3.34pm Monday

I’ve made my way home this afternoon with discharge papers. They tell a tale, in clipped medical terminology, of a fretful person wheeled in a few days ago, now restored to a happy non-bleeding normality. 

Am I mended? I think so. I hope so. The doctor said to me, on day four of waiting: wounds get tired of bleeding. 

This wound had some stamina, tell you what. It also produced clots like nobody’s business. 

Sometimes you can just wash the clots out by keeping the patient hooked up to a fast-flowing drip. But sometimes they will be too big and they will not pass. Then you have to go in and syringe them out with fluid. That’s the washout though the catheter that I’ve mentioned before with eyes still wide from my first encounter.

Sometimes the washout won’t find much and sometimes it will find an absolute mushroom field of them.

The night before last we had a good hour or more of it. Ameri, the wonderful nurse doing it as two student nurses watched on, fascinated, said: sometimes it can take as much as four hours. Whatever might be happening to you in hospital, you can be sure someone has had this worse than you.

One student asked me: how much does it hurt? I told her, to the fitful rhythm of the syringing, not as much as getting your finger jammed in a door, more like an electric shock. It’s a pretty sensitive place to get an electric shock, though. Just ask the torture people.

Through my years of heart attacks and heart-attack panic-attacks, and medication side-effect collapses, I have built up a sense of hospital as being just one kind of experience. That experience is: you have the suffering, then the ambulance collects you and delivers you into the comforting arms of the hospital to watch you as you recover. Hence my nostalgia for the hospital bed at 3am when I play music to myself and feel quite blissfully untethered.

But that's just one way to experience it and of course there are so many more, and of course many are not blissful at all.

My two trips this month have been a new kind of experience. The ordeal is not behind you when the ambulance arrives at the hospital. The ordeal is ahead, in the washing out of the clots that won’t stop. The ordeal is ahead in the hoping that you’ve finally stopped bleeding, checking the colour of the tube draining out of you. Is it red or pink or cider? Each time it becomes cider, you breathe out, thinking it over, then it goes pink again and you're dejected.  Four days it took, this time, watching and washing and syringing and waiting for the last determined little bastard clot to show itself.

Finally last night, it came clear.

Once everything was cleaned up, the catheter finally out, I washed down two Sevredol tablets of opioid pain relief and surrendered to the old 3am hospital bed bliss.

This morning I texted Mr F Macdonald:

Last night the government gave me free morphine and a fancy bed to lie in listening to Led Zeppelin. How fucking great is socialism

He said:

Isn’t that what we all get when we turn 60?

Yesterday, still in the midst of the gloom, a nurse told me: we see people coming back eight months later, bleeding again. Also he said: possibly the best exercise from now on is just walking.

God, no, surely not, I thought. But also: but that's not what the surgeon said last week.

I raised it this morning with the doctor. Oh no, he said, that's what happens to some 80 year olds. You're fit, you're young, you'll be fine.

That sounds right to me, and thank god for that, but I'll also take plenty of time getting back into it. How does one stay out of this trouble? One gets even more damn careful than I was. Two lapses are two too many. I do not want to go back if I can possibly help it.

3.48pm

I first met Siouxsie Wiles when I was hosting at Radio Live. She was the lively science expert who would come in to explain complex things and generally impart a bit of wonder. Always a dream guest.

Then when she was starting up at Stuff as a columnist she contacted Ali Mau and me to propose a coffee chat about columnising. When we sat down it was immediately clear she was more than able to write a terrific column, she was simply wanting to find out if there was more she could know, more she could do, to bring as much to it as she could. She’s committed to doing the best she can, always.

It’s a very special skill to distill the complex into the clear and obvious. It can make the task look simple and easy, when it's not at all. That's what she's achieved this past year explaining the pandemic and how to deal with it.

Today is her birthday and a party’s been happening on Twitter to let her know that whatever any Great Barrington/Plan B/BillyTK moron might want to say to cast doubt on her work or her message, there is huge appreciation for what she's done. If you feel like adding your good wishes, its #dayofthedoctor on Twitter. People are also going pink in her honour, but after four days I’m done with that bit.

Happy birthday Siouxsie.

4.20pm

I used to work with Ruth Spencer at Metro and she is one damn sharp funny clever writer. Years ago, she took Mary-Margaret to an Arctic Monkeys show when I couldn't make it and ended up becoming a kind of big sister to her; also her stand-up comedy mentor, because Ruth has all the skills. If you haven't checked out her work in places like Canvas you must.

I asked would she fancy a bit of this Favourite Fourth Form music bizzo, what with her having been in an actual band and everything, she said oh hell yes.

Afterwards, she wrote: Looking up the charts for a year like that is a trip, isn’t it?

Oh you bet it is.

Full of appreciation for friends in my hour of need. Cheers Ruth.

Guest Writer Ruth Spencer

So far the Friends Of David Delving Eruditely Rearward (FODDER) Society have tended towards the mid 70’s in their 4th form nostalgia.  Disco, glam rock, it’s all cool - you could name almost anything from the era and maintain your cachet.  I, however, was busy being born, and so I missed it. My only real-life memory of 70s music was being scared of the cat one from KISS. I’m still edgy about mimes. 

My 4th form year was 1990. Yes, that 1990, the one of the Sesqui. “It’s Sesqui 1990, in the Land of the Long White Cloud!” we sang, because who needs lyrics when you can be literal.  To our mild surprise the Kotuku was suddenly our new national symbol.  The white heron, gracious and magical - we were told that you’d be lucky to see one in your lifetime, and then one came to live on my Mum’s roof and ate all her goldfish. An ungainly seconds-bin flamingo flailing over the fence when shouted at, as a national symbol it seemed kind of okay.  

I was thirteen for most of that year.  I was deeply in love with Jon Bon Jovi and my life size poster of him which I still have. Two copies of. Fight me, he’s beautiful.  The charts were amazing: Roxette’s It Must Have Been Love, which my sister Kristen had on a Be Your Own Popstar cassette tape, an early and mind-blowing iteration of karaoke with the instrumental versions on side B.  Madonna’s Vogue, which was in exactly the same key as the test pattern tone. Remember the test pattern tone? It went OOOOOOOOOH just like that bit before ‘Let your body move to the music’ on exactly the same note. I memorised the periodic table to the spoken bit from Vogue. The world made more sense in 1990. 

My most solid musical memory of that year is 4th form camp.  We went to Lake Rotoiti, the one in Marlborough, because I’m from Blenheim. Some kind of weird government-issue yellow-beige concrete dorm facility with bunk beds.  I played Penelope Sheep (a pun on Penelope Barr) in a weather report skit which absolutely killed. “Everyone in Taupo smoked weed today, so there’s a high over the North Island (hysterical laughter). All the girls on camp at Lake Rotoiti got their periods so there’s a depression over the top of the South Island (rolling in the aisles).”  We didn’t have Tik Tok, the bar was lower. 

What I remember most clearly is the girls who were brave and sure of themselves, and brought their tape players and music with them.  I would never have been confident enough to say, hey, let’s all listen to MY mixtape, which is just as well because I only had one and it had Phantom of the Opera on it and was given to me at 12 by my friend Catherine Smart who understands people.  But the cool girls knew what was cool, and so the soundtrack to 4th form camp was the gaspy Kiss by Prince, and Strokin’ by Clarence Carter Weeks. You’ll remember Clarence from such other hits as …oh.  ‘I’m strokin’ to the east, I’m strokin’ to the west, I’m strokin’ to the woman that I love the best. I be STROKIN’’. It gets worse after that. Don’t WAP me.