Читать книгу Catheter, Come Home - Steve Rudd - Страница 10

3: Now ICU, now I don’t

I woke up in a recovery room, and vaguely registered that Debbie and her mother were there, plus a new nurse I had never met before. That was about all I knew. In fact I wasn’t even sure who I was, or why. I drifted in and out. When I woke up again, a couple of times, later, they were still there, talking about me as if I wasn’t, and in fact I probably wasn’t.

I’ve no idea how much time I passed in this state, but when I was eventually comps mentis enough to take notice again, the nurse gave me a little thing like a clicky button into my feeble hand, and told me it was the pain management system. Any time I felt the pain, I was to click the little button and that would send a shot of painkiller into my system via the drip. (I was, of course, still hooked up to all of the various drips and catheters and things, so much so that I’d grown startlingly used to having them by me.)

I tried a few experimental clicks and was immediately suffused with a feeling of warmth and well-being. I could get used to this, I thought, and the best thing is, it’s non-addictive, or so the nurse had said.

After a while, it became clear to me that, although I was talking perfectly lucidly and calmly to Debbie and her mum, or so I thought, from their reactions I was in fact being totally random and incoherent, and increasingly so, in direct proportion to how often I used the self-administered “pain control system”. Oh, what the hell, give it another couple of clicks, what harm can it do? By the time my sister and my brother-in-law arrived, I was reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet about ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ to the nurse. Since I had apparently chosen this bizarre activity precisely to demonstrate to everyone in the room that I was in control of things, clearly it showed I wasn’t, after which they took my clicker away from me, and grumpily, I fell asleep.