After I caught my breath at the hotel I headed out for
Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH). It’s a
20-minute walk from the British Colonial Hilton. The first half of the walk is through the
port-associated tourist traps. The
second half, not so much. But in the
daylight I wasn’t concerned about it.
As I started my walk, I saw the BTC telephone store across
the street from the hotel that Adrian told me about (lots of things are
apparently across the street from the British Colonial). There I could get a sim card for my phone since it
wasn’t working in the Bahamas and keep everybody in touch. Or I could get a cheap phone. Or I could do what I wound up doing: staring
at the door of the closed store. I
missed it by about 20 minutes and now would have to wait until Monday morning
for it to open (this was Saturday).
Communicating with the boys and my boss would have to be through old
school e-mail until then.
When I returned to PMH’s A&E (that’s Accident and
Emergency, the term used in the Queen’s English for what is called the ED or ER
in ‘murica) I found Shelagh in the same place but with a different
wardrobe. She was wearing a hospital
gown, which isn’t any different from those in the US – designed for easy access and to maximize patient humiliation. The pants she was wearing when she fell
couldn’t be taken off normally because of her injury and the splinting, and they had
to be cut off. They were her favorite
capris. She was heartbroken. She was also saddened because she had a new
pair of white sandals that were super comfy for her and the left one was pretty
bloodied. I told her not to worry, I
knew how to get blood off of things. Not
only did I work in EMS at places that had white uniform shirts, but I also
worked at a blood bank as a phlebotomist back when we had to launder our own
white lab coats. The best trick I learned
was that running large volumes of cold water over the stain with some gentle
friction works like a charm. And even
the next day when I got around to trying to clean her sandal, it worked. So there’s your stain removal tip of the day,
free of charge.
Just as I caught sight of Shelagh in her bed, I was told to
follow as she was being taken to x-ray.
She had already been seen by an orthopedic surgeon and surgery was going to happen right away
(yay!), but they needed to see what exactly they were dealing with (really good
idea there, doc). When we got there, I
sat in the waiting area just outside the x-ray room she was taken into. This allowed me to be a knowing but very unwilling audience
to what I knew I was about to hear. I
had an ankle sprain about 30 years ago and knew they would manipulate her foot
to get clear views of the bottom ends of the leg bones. It was
excruciating for me with a moderate sprain and I knew it would be much, much worse
for her. Listening to her undergoing the
necessary torture was shattering.
 |
Her fractures prior to surgery.
In order to get a good view of the bottom of the tibia and fibula her foot had to be pulled down. |
Once the films were obtained and deemed to be of sufficient
quality (thank God because she didn’t have to go through that again), she was
taken to the OR, or ‘Operating Theatre’ in the vernacular. I was plopped in the surgery waiting
room. It was spacious, well-appointed
and more modern than the rest of the hospital.
I was pleasantly surprised by how soft and comfortable the chairs were. I was also pleased that I was the only one
there. I wasn’t in the mood for crowds
and noise.
After a while a lady who worked in registration came in and
said we still needed to do some paperwork, or as they say in American
healthcare, we still needed to do some paperwork. We took care of that and the lady asked if I
needed dinner. I said that I did and she
kindly escorted me to the cafeteria.
This was truly kind of her because I was just beginning to notice that
there was absolutely no directional signage in the hospital. The various areas were marked at the
entrances to those areas, such as ‘Radiology’ and ‘Accident and Emergency’ but
no indications anywhere as to how to get from one to the other. When we got to the cafeteria, she even walked
me through the process, which was also very kind because it was not anything I
was going to figure out. Even in
retrospect, I’m not sure how money from my pocket turned into food in my hand. And then to top off her kindness, she made
sure I could get back to the waiting room.
My regret is that I never got the name of this angel.
What I wound up with was stewed lamb chops on a bed of rice
with mixed peas and green beans. The
peas and beans were blah, but the lamb was good. Not gourmet, mind you – this was a hospital,
after all – but something I would recommend to anyone having no choice but to
eat at the PMH cafeteria.
The waiting room, as I mentioned earlier, was all mine. But it was also oppressive because of one
thing: CNN. There was a TV on the wall
that had CNN on, at a volume that wasn’t too loud, but was difficult to
ignore. And it wasn’t a case of my
having anything against CNN (I have long since loathed all the US news
networks), it’s just that they had on nothing but a long line of talking heads
going on and on and on and on about a top secret document that they had never
seen, and for that matter, may not even actually exist. But boy, could those people make up complete
BS and state it authoritatively, sometimes even forcefully, in order to fill up
the entire evening with things that weren’t news.
Around 2 hours after Shelagh went into the pre-op area, the
PACU Sister (nurse) came into the room.
She said, “Mr. Erskine?” and I leapt to my feet since she was going to
tell me that it was over and everything was OK.
Well, I didn’t leap because rapidly exiting those comfy chairs was the same as leaping from a La-Z-Boy…it just doesn’t happen, regardless of one’s
athleticism. So I stood up as quickly as
possible and she told me that Shelagh had just gone into the theatre because
she got bumped a couple of times for emergencies.
{sigh😒}
The hell of it is that I can’t even pretend to be upset
about this because researching and improving the triage of injured patients has
been part of my job for the better part of the past two decades. I’m going to have to figure out a “Hey!
That’s my Sweetie!” exception. (Cam,
let’s talk about this.)
I did take advantage of the Sister’s presence to ask if
there was a remote anywhere for the TV.
She dug through some desks and found it.
Hallelujah! I went up just one
channel, landed on the BBC and they were reporting
actual news. They spoke of the
Olympics, the confusing multilateral civil war in Syria, wearable technology,
storms battering Sri Lanka and SE India, the growing shortage of Egyptian penguin milk and any number of things that, if not relevant to me, were at least important to someone.
For the next couple of hours I alternately played games on
my phone, dozed in the comfy chairs, got terrified by how low my battery charge
was dropping while in a foreign hospital and a 20 minute walk from my chargers
in the hotel, playing some more games anyway, and watching the BBC’s report on
the issues revolving around why British nurses trained at the
Royal Victoria Hospital
don’t get
Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’ sketch.
(OK, that last one is actually a reference to an incident
that occurred once while Shelagh and I were driving through West Virginia. Ask either one of us and we’ll be happy to
share this one with you.)
Finally, the Sister came in and told me she was out and
doing fine. The surgery was a
success. I wound up speaking with the
anesthesiologist, who told me all went well from his perspective, both
induction and emergence, as well as an orthopedic surgery resident who said
that the fracture itself wasn’t severe but still required some screws and
plating.
I got to go in to PACU to see her a little bit later and she
looked as well as somebody emerging from anesthesia can look - pale, pasty, shivering, not pretty and pretty shocking if you've never seen it before. She smiled when she saw me and we spoke
briefly. She was in no pain, had a cast
and she could wiggle her toes.
 |
| After ORIF (open reduction, internal fixation), showing plate, screws, skin staples and cast. |
The Sister took me back out to the waiting room, told me which one of the wards could find her in in the morning and then asked how I
was getting back to the hotel. “I’ll
walk. It’s only 20 minutes from here,” I
said. The look of consternation that overtook
her face told me immediately that that was the wrong answer. 😳 It was approaching 11pm and those not touristy
areas were not a place for tourists after dark.
Just then Dr. Kumar, an anesthesiologist (not the one I spoke with)
walked through on his way home. The
Sister asked him if he could give me a ride, which he was more than happy to
do. A few minutes later I was back in my
room. It was 11 o’clock and we had
packed a lot of adventure into the preceding 13 hours.
{Click here for Part 3!}
