Saturday 9.22pm
Day 5 in hospital and so much hurry up and wait has been on the menu, speaking of the menu, the first 3 days they didn’t feed me or give me water because of all the x-rays and procedures and alike. All I really know for sure is that the German medical reality is simply this: One thing per day. I can see that much of what I have and had done over the past 5 daze could have been done in 2, but it is, as I suspect a sure way to drain the insurance company of money, cynical or accurate?
I have been sharing a room with 2 other old men, one has come, gone and been replaced and all have had serious surgery, bags hanging from sticks and bags filled with blood going in and coming out have been my visual delight for the past 5 days. Another highlight is the priviledged sight I have had while eating my meals the last few days, the 80 year old next to me is still wearing an operating gown and he faces away from me when he sits up to eat and all I can see, and which turns me off my food, in an 80 year old bare back and ass, who needs Jenny Craig?
Having to sit in bed all day, being woken at 6.30 by boistrous nurses lacking any calm skills of grace and being poked and prodded and then having my bed changed daily. The sitting without speak and waiting for the next tidbit of info or procedure is the real draining influence.
My head spins with a frenetic whirl of things I should and could be doing, namely work, but more to the point, organising bank accounts and getting gas and electricity connected, worrying about my car left unattended for the better half of a week in a more than unsavoury suburb. Thinking about money and time and things left undone and all the extra work that everyone I work with has had to do, already stretched beyond their limits.
I fret about the the students I have and the course material in my laptop and not in their folders on the shelves at work to make it easier for my colleagues to just take the classes and keep them on track.
On top of all this I feel far too much the pain of loneliness. All self inflicted but nonetheless agonising. Why do I keep finding myself alone and in dire situations, like being couped up in a room and harrassed by nurses with the finese of truckdrivers. Why am I alone?
I have asked, pleaded and almost begged my new colleagues and the closest people to friends I have to help me, and aside from a phone call from one to ask me about school stuff and the broken promise of a visit from another, and still another ‘close friend’, whom I have known for 20 years who lives in a city a few hundred kilometres from here, she smsed me and asked if I had fallen off the earth. I, with the very very little credit I have left on my phone (and no way to replace it in hospital), smsed her and told her I have been in hospital and feeling depressed and lonely and a lot of pain, her sms reply was to say “poor boy” and completely dismiss my plea of a phone call. So this exemplifies my friends status – ZERO.
It is terrible to be in a situation where you cannot trust anyone enough to have them do something for you and those few you do, do nothing but stare like people do at car accidents, the ones that do nothing but the armchair coaching from the sidelines on what should and shouldn’t happen. Well to them I say – I AM A REAL PERSON, with feelings and needs as much as anyone. I have been very generous and done all I can to build bridges with my colleagues, German and non German alike and the result is that I am here and no one gives a shit to call or visit and ask if I need something, my few smses have gone unanswered and I feel quite embarressed that I even asked them in the first place.
I have been throwing myself 200% into work and organising up a storm perhaps to avoid the loneliness which always happens at the start of any new country or job, I know this. But this isn’t right. From any angle.
So why have I brought myself to another stark example of being in a new place where I am completly alone? Why do I do it, what do I have the need to inflict so much unhappiness on myself? – it’s anyones guess.
The funny thing is that the doctor said I have more procedures Monday and Tuesday but I could have gone home this weekend, I told him after much hesitation that I would rather stay in. I have the hateful fleabag hotel to go back to and even more solitude. Here I have a meal and a bed and pretend I have company...
Obi – pressing the red button again for the nurse to bring more pain killers... But it doesnt dull the real ache.
Day 6
I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5 this morning, tho god must have been there, some lovely sunbeams lit up a corner of the room. I wondered at the time why we haven’t figured out why light is both a wave and a partical, but I will leave that for some genius to figure out at 5am
I raised my bed and lay there listening to the nothings of the morning and started to cry. Breakfast had been delivered and so I hope that my roommates had not noticed me crying, I sobbed quietly and turned by head away from them as they continued with their breakfast, I spoke to the nurse and told him of the intense pain in my back radiating down to my legs and in due time the doctor came and asked me a few questions.
I put my tears down to the pain I was feeling, I just didnt tell him it wasn’t a physical pain that was making me cry. I miss so many people, I miss being cared about, I need some human contact other than somone smsing me with ‘Poor Boy’ and alike...
So today – Sunday – another ultrasound and Monday a jolly good go at the stone shattering machine again. The doctor says I can’t go home until Tuesday at the earliest, that will make 7 days in here, with the smells and sights and sounds of all the sickness around me. Anyone figured out that I am not a good patient yet? I have. I was antsy to leave Thursday, but no luck there.
The doctors has stated that they are amazed how dense the stone is and say it will take at least 3 other treatments to get close to the desired effect – which is sand. I won’t even go into the catheter they inserted into my kidney 4 days ago... that is another kettle of fish.
So – I am sorry that my blog isn’t the standard of overcoming challenges and and personal musings, its just that I have no one to talk to and you dear readers, multiplied and diffused throughtout the world are the closest to my heart. This a good quote ruined by me from the pope about 40 years ago, but it is apt for me now...
The thing about being in a foreign country is that you rarely see the big picture, this being from spoken and written information. I seem to be here this week with no end in sight, and generally no idea of when the next procedure is or what it will be. All people work well when they know the outcome or the duration of anything. Take a dvd for example, would you rent it if it didnt have a glossy picture on the cover? Or if there was no blurb on the back describing the story and what will happen, even vaguely. Or the length of the dvd, would you pay a good $5 for a dvd that runs for 20 mins or inversely, would you stil down to watch one that you knew little about and didn’t know when it finished? So too is my life. – this isnt a complaint gentle readers, it is just an observation. I have come to be able to accept this as the norm in my life.
Another thing I don’t do is watch TV, radio or read the news at all, simply because I don’t understand it, but also because it is very liberating not to have a head filled with half news stories from around the world and the chorus of the last song I heard on the radio, my head was built for better things. It has worked quite well. I am more my own person and less the puppet of the media or a receptical for the crap that is fed to us in unrealistic amounts.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for the world, I love it in fact. I have seen a lot of it and revelled in the joy of it. It is simply that I would like to choose what goes in my head.
Oh – a nurse has come in to the room for the 80 year old, please explain to me why all nurses, who are adults themselves speak to patients like they are children in a one sided dialogues? Can they not manage to be themselves in their jobs and need this mechanism as a tool to better get the job done. I can’t say cart blanc that all nurses are like this, I am just speaking from my limited experiences in hospitals.
No sign of the 80 year olds ass today thank god, he now has his gown off and jim jams on! One thing that does bug me, maybe because I come from a country in the grips of a never ending drought, why – pray tell WHY, when my room mates shave over the sink, why is it that they leave the tap running for 20+ minutes? It is a shocking waste of water. I guess I can’t apply my cultural sensibilities to them, they do live on the banks of the 2 biggest rivers in europe, so water is never an issue. It just annoys me quietly...
I didnt expect to be here this long as you all know, if I had A) I would have brought some work with me to do and prepare for next week. B) I would have brought more than 1 change of jammies. ...And finally, C) I would have brought more money with me. The out of pocket expenses her at the hospital are 10 euros a day. I have just enough for a weeks visit and this total amount I must pay on exit of the hospital.
I wonder if I can beg my colleagues to come and collect me. It will be like asking for a favour after kiiling someones brother and I am sure the task will be passed around the room and made excuses for not doing it. It is quite odd they don’t know this: The unspoken code of English Teacher is to take care of each other, to listen and help and encourage each other. It seems that I have met only 10% of teachers who have a vague notion of this. Take my example in Poland, a jobless homeless teacher I took into my home and fed him and found him a job etc, who then shit in my face afterward. Another in Poland, I sought out because I knew his girlfriend lived in my town and I offered him my job and groomed him for the interview and all I got in reply was a terse bitterness from a drunkard.
Even when I got here, a colleagues laptop crashed and she lost all her photos 6 gig, so I did my best to recover them and I succeeded, not one word of thanks and later that week when I asked her to drive me home in a company car – 3km out of her way, she almost had a hissy fit. You think I would learn. Who said it – ‘do unto others...’ I don’t want this seemingly endless pattern to force me from giving up my kind and generous nature.
Anyone noticed I am rambling now? I am waiting for a nurse to come and give me some super pain killers. I hope I don’t have to wait all day...
2pm – small mercies. I had a visitor! Well he had to come to emergency anyway, he buggered his knee so after he was seen to he smsed and came up to see me. I was quite a moral boost and I am pleased someone came and I got the news from work etc. I was nice to be connected to something or someone again.
6pm – after making a joke of having my temperature taken and telling the nurses about my symptoms I finally showed them that I have an infection. IV antibotics and a horrble night at 39.5 and I sweated out the infection, god I gelt horrible. And, as a reward, I am not allowed breakfast. The procedure today is a repeat of last Thursday. The attempt to shatter the stone. Maybe I should call my week here – romancing the stone –tho I don’t think it will make a good movie.
The parade of doctors has come in and said that because I had such a high fever last night they can’t do the sonic shock therapy. So I am very upste and wasted a weekend in here – tho I did get the care I needed during the fever, so I can’t complain.
Now I am at work , I got here an hour after i forced them to release me today at 4pm to do some catch up work, it is now 11pm - I am a fucking idiot. Obi
Day 5 in hospital and so much hurry up and wait has been on the menu, speaking of the menu, the first 3 days they didn’t feed me or give me water because of all the x-rays and procedures and alike. All I really know for sure is that the German medical reality is simply this: One thing per day. I can see that much of what I have and had done over the past 5 daze could have been done in 2, but it is, as I suspect a sure way to drain the insurance company of money, cynical or accurate?
I have been sharing a room with 2 other old men, one has come, gone and been replaced and all have had serious surgery, bags hanging from sticks and bags filled with blood going in and coming out have been my visual delight for the past 5 days. Another highlight is the priviledged sight I have had while eating my meals the last few days, the 80 year old next to me is still wearing an operating gown and he faces away from me when he sits up to eat and all I can see, and which turns me off my food, in an 80 year old bare back and ass, who needs Jenny Craig?
Having to sit in bed all day, being woken at 6.30 by boistrous nurses lacking any calm skills of grace and being poked and prodded and then having my bed changed daily. The sitting without speak and waiting for the next tidbit of info or procedure is the real draining influence.
My head spins with a frenetic whirl of things I should and could be doing, namely work, but more to the point, organising bank accounts and getting gas and electricity connected, worrying about my car left unattended for the better half of a week in a more than unsavoury suburb. Thinking about money and time and things left undone and all the extra work that everyone I work with has had to do, already stretched beyond their limits.
I fret about the the students I have and the course material in my laptop and not in their folders on the shelves at work to make it easier for my colleagues to just take the classes and keep them on track.
On top of all this I feel far too much the pain of loneliness. All self inflicted but nonetheless agonising. Why do I keep finding myself alone and in dire situations, like being couped up in a room and harrassed by nurses with the finese of truckdrivers. Why am I alone?
I have asked, pleaded and almost begged my new colleagues and the closest people to friends I have to help me, and aside from a phone call from one to ask me about school stuff and the broken promise of a visit from another, and still another ‘close friend’, whom I have known for 20 years who lives in a city a few hundred kilometres from here, she smsed me and asked if I had fallen off the earth. I, with the very very little credit I have left on my phone (and no way to replace it in hospital), smsed her and told her I have been in hospital and feeling depressed and lonely and a lot of pain, her sms reply was to say “poor boy” and completely dismiss my plea of a phone call. So this exemplifies my friends status – ZERO.
It is terrible to be in a situation where you cannot trust anyone enough to have them do something for you and those few you do, do nothing but stare like people do at car accidents, the ones that do nothing but the armchair coaching from the sidelines on what should and shouldn’t happen. Well to them I say – I AM A REAL PERSON, with feelings and needs as much as anyone. I have been very generous and done all I can to build bridges with my colleagues, German and non German alike and the result is that I am here and no one gives a shit to call or visit and ask if I need something, my few smses have gone unanswered and I feel quite embarressed that I even asked them in the first place.
I have been throwing myself 200% into work and organising up a storm perhaps to avoid the loneliness which always happens at the start of any new country or job, I know this. But this isn’t right. From any angle.
So why have I brought myself to another stark example of being in a new place where I am completly alone? Why do I do it, what do I have the need to inflict so much unhappiness on myself? – it’s anyones guess.
The funny thing is that the doctor said I have more procedures Monday and Tuesday but I could have gone home this weekend, I told him after much hesitation that I would rather stay in. I have the hateful fleabag hotel to go back to and even more solitude. Here I have a meal and a bed and pretend I have company...
Obi – pressing the red button again for the nurse to bring more pain killers... But it doesnt dull the real ache.
Day 6
I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5 this morning, tho god must have been there, some lovely sunbeams lit up a corner of the room. I wondered at the time why we haven’t figured out why light is both a wave and a partical, but I will leave that for some genius to figure out at 5am
I raised my bed and lay there listening to the nothings of the morning and started to cry. Breakfast had been delivered and so I hope that my roommates had not noticed me crying, I sobbed quietly and turned by head away from them as they continued with their breakfast, I spoke to the nurse and told him of the intense pain in my back radiating down to my legs and in due time the doctor came and asked me a few questions.
I put my tears down to the pain I was feeling, I just didnt tell him it wasn’t a physical pain that was making me cry. I miss so many people, I miss being cared about, I need some human contact other than somone smsing me with ‘Poor Boy’ and alike...
So today – Sunday – another ultrasound and Monday a jolly good go at the stone shattering machine again. The doctor says I can’t go home until Tuesday at the earliest, that will make 7 days in here, with the smells and sights and sounds of all the sickness around me. Anyone figured out that I am not a good patient yet? I have. I was antsy to leave Thursday, but no luck there.
The doctors has stated that they are amazed how dense the stone is and say it will take at least 3 other treatments to get close to the desired effect – which is sand. I won’t even go into the catheter they inserted into my kidney 4 days ago... that is another kettle of fish.
So – I am sorry that my blog isn’t the standard of overcoming challenges and and personal musings, its just that I have no one to talk to and you dear readers, multiplied and diffused throughtout the world are the closest to my heart. This a good quote ruined by me from the pope about 40 years ago, but it is apt for me now...
The thing about being in a foreign country is that you rarely see the big picture, this being from spoken and written information. I seem to be here this week with no end in sight, and generally no idea of when the next procedure is or what it will be. All people work well when they know the outcome or the duration of anything. Take a dvd for example, would you rent it if it didnt have a glossy picture on the cover? Or if there was no blurb on the back describing the story and what will happen, even vaguely. Or the length of the dvd, would you pay a good $5 for a dvd that runs for 20 mins or inversely, would you stil down to watch one that you knew little about and didn’t know when it finished? So too is my life. – this isnt a complaint gentle readers, it is just an observation. I have come to be able to accept this as the norm in my life.
Another thing I don’t do is watch TV, radio or read the news at all, simply because I don’t understand it, but also because it is very liberating not to have a head filled with half news stories from around the world and the chorus of the last song I heard on the radio, my head was built for better things. It has worked quite well. I am more my own person and less the puppet of the media or a receptical for the crap that is fed to us in unrealistic amounts.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for the world, I love it in fact. I have seen a lot of it and revelled in the joy of it. It is simply that I would like to choose what goes in my head.
Oh – a nurse has come in to the room for the 80 year old, please explain to me why all nurses, who are adults themselves speak to patients like they are children in a one sided dialogues? Can they not manage to be themselves in their jobs and need this mechanism as a tool to better get the job done. I can’t say cart blanc that all nurses are like this, I am just speaking from my limited experiences in hospitals.
No sign of the 80 year olds ass today thank god, he now has his gown off and jim jams on! One thing that does bug me, maybe because I come from a country in the grips of a never ending drought, why – pray tell WHY, when my room mates shave over the sink, why is it that they leave the tap running for 20+ minutes? It is a shocking waste of water. I guess I can’t apply my cultural sensibilities to them, they do live on the banks of the 2 biggest rivers in europe, so water is never an issue. It just annoys me quietly...
I didnt expect to be here this long as you all know, if I had A) I would have brought some work with me to do and prepare for next week. B) I would have brought more than 1 change of jammies. ...And finally, C) I would have brought more money with me. The out of pocket expenses her at the hospital are 10 euros a day. I have just enough for a weeks visit and this total amount I must pay on exit of the hospital.
I wonder if I can beg my colleagues to come and collect me. It will be like asking for a favour after kiiling someones brother and I am sure the task will be passed around the room and made excuses for not doing it. It is quite odd they don’t know this: The unspoken code of English Teacher is to take care of each other, to listen and help and encourage each other. It seems that I have met only 10% of teachers who have a vague notion of this. Take my example in Poland, a jobless homeless teacher I took into my home and fed him and found him a job etc, who then shit in my face afterward. Another in Poland, I sought out because I knew his girlfriend lived in my town and I offered him my job and groomed him for the interview and all I got in reply was a terse bitterness from a drunkard.
Even when I got here, a colleagues laptop crashed and she lost all her photos 6 gig, so I did my best to recover them and I succeeded, not one word of thanks and later that week when I asked her to drive me home in a company car – 3km out of her way, she almost had a hissy fit. You think I would learn. Who said it – ‘do unto others...’ I don’t want this seemingly endless pattern to force me from giving up my kind and generous nature.
Anyone noticed I am rambling now? I am waiting for a nurse to come and give me some super pain killers. I hope I don’t have to wait all day...
2pm – small mercies. I had a visitor! Well he had to come to emergency anyway, he buggered his knee so after he was seen to he smsed and came up to see me. I was quite a moral boost and I am pleased someone came and I got the news from work etc. I was nice to be connected to something or someone again.
6pm – after making a joke of having my temperature taken and telling the nurses about my symptoms I finally showed them that I have an infection. IV antibotics and a horrble night at 39.5 and I sweated out the infection, god I gelt horrible. And, as a reward, I am not allowed breakfast. The procedure today is a repeat of last Thursday. The attempt to shatter the stone. Maybe I should call my week here – romancing the stone –tho I don’t think it will make a good movie.
The parade of doctors has come in and said that because I had such a high fever last night they can’t do the sonic shock therapy. So I am very upste and wasted a weekend in here – tho I did get the care I needed during the fever, so I can’t complain.
Now I am at work , I got here an hour after i forced them to release me today at 4pm to do some catch up work, it is now 11pm - I am a fucking idiot. Obi
posted by Obi Won Kenardly at 11:02 pm
1 Comments:
well my dear ur certainly not the EASIEST to communicate with but i can assure you that prayers went up for you regardless and that people do care even if they werent able to let you know about it. Don't be too cynical and don't try too hard to remember the bad but recall the good!
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