Sinister sickness

Anita felt very grumpy. She had to go up to the local hospital for another test, but she didn’t really believe that they would find anything unless they did the real tests. She knew, she thought she did, what might be in her body, but she had sighed, got frustrated, even got angry, when she’d been up there before. No, they didn’t find anything, and yet she could tell them why her stomach was painful, why she had backaches, why her legs cramped, why there were hours when she couldn’t even see.

Every single day she woke up early in the morning in pain, curled up with her stomach feeling like it was due to burst out, her head feeling like a migraine after putting up with the rest of her body for so long – and she believed that! She would lie on her side and concentrate on breathing in, breathing out, long slow breaths which she hoped, every day, would relieve her pain at least a little bit. It was a week since she’d last gone up to the hospital, to Emergency. She’d given them her own details – female, 50, not smoking - when she couldn’t breathe very much at all. Short breath. She’d fought for it. She’d broken out in sweat, but the EMT department ignored her and worked around her, leaving her just to lie there.

She’d been there for 4 hours, and perhaps because she’d dozed – more coma, she thought – the EMT had just sent her home because she wasn’t sweating any more and wasn’t in pain. Or they thought that. If she hadn’t been so weary that she had dozed off – gone into a coma – she would still have experienced the most dreadful pain! They’d given them a different out-patient appointment in a week.

Right now she couldn’t even see properly because of the migraine, yet she still had to have her shower, get dressed, and watch out for the taxi which was her only way to get to the hospital.

It seemed to be forever, but he arrived and she crouched out to it without help, feeling like she was in a stealth mode. Getting into the taxi was hard, and even sitting in that meant she had to lean forward over her knees, keeping her stomach tight. She concentrated on breathing in, breathing out, long slow breaths. It seemed to take forever to get to the hospital. She couldn’t even watch the scenery, which once she’d loved. Getting out of the taxi was even worse than getting in, and she crouched again as she went in to the out-patients clinic. She gave them her name. They didn’t even look at her. She’d have to wait, again, she thought.

They wanted her to have a seat, but if she sat down now she knew she couldn’t even get up again, so she leaned on a wall. And waited. She concentrated on her breathing, short but it had to go in to her lungs.

Her eyes were closed when she finally heard the doctor call her name. It was now 30 minutes after her appointment time; she’d been waiting again, same as last time. She took a deep breath in slowly and stood up, tried very hard to walk straight but she knew that she had to crouch. She followed the doctor, along the passage, into his office… and there she collapsed onto the floor. She could hear his sigh, his grumbling. She was definitely in pain, couldn’t breathe properly. Her back felt like it had been stabbed, like they’d stuck in a knife and had turned it round and upwards, and her stomach… well, that would burst. Or would have. She was sure. Then she blacked out.

She didn’t hear anything else. She didn’t realise that they had taken her into a different ward. She didn’t know that she was injected with anesthetic drugs. She didn’t know she was going to be operated on. She didn’t know that her abdominal aortic aneurysm had burst. But she had expected it. No-one else had expected it.

Her eyes opened, finally. She had no memory at all of what had been done to her. She lay flat on her ICU hospital bed, looked up and saw the curtain rail, saw the medical drug lines, saw that her stomach was stitched together, saw that she was alone. No pain that she could actually feel. She felt pretty drugged up. And yet, as she began to understand what had happened, there was a smile which grew on her face. She couldn’t control it, it made her feel that today had been funny. Yes, she thought, they’d made that joke, and now it had back-fired on them.

She still had her grin on her face when the doctor came round to check how she was. She didn’t care about how he now felt. She felt much, much better.