On behalf of my dear old ma.
Fair enough not myself, but witnessed first-hand and it's been a while since I last posted.


One Thursday night a couple of months ago I got a call on my return from work. My mother had been taken into hospital by ambulance. No more info than that, cue a rather anxious trip to A&E.

Background~
Mumsy isn't the picture of health. She had a stroke around 10 years ago (in her mid forties) but thankfully recovered well. She's smoked since she was 12 and in the last few years has leaned rather too heavily toward the whisky bottle. Added to this, her diet is shit and consists mainly of ready meals and chip-pan based foodstuffs.

Anyway, we get to the hospital and are told it's suspected food poisoning cos she yakked and keeled over half an hour after her tea (Vesta packet chow mein!) she'd had a shot of morphine from the paramedic and another after admission but was still in very evident pain (doubled over and crying out with abdominal pain). Given her history as summarised above we thought her kidneys had packed up or something.

After a few hours watching her writhe in pain (even with another morphine hit) we were moved to another hospital in the city where they would examine her further. A few hours there and they had to stop giving her morphine. Her eyes were the proverbial 'piss-holes in the snow' and to administer any more would "seriously threaten her life". This was early hours of Friday morning, she had to wait another 36 hours on enough morphine to fuck up a rhino still writhing in pain (oh, and burping like nothing I've heard before. You know those huge ones you can do after downing a litre of fizzy pop - think 6 to 12 of those in immediate succession).

Anyway, long story (already!) much shorter, they opened her up on the Saturday afternoon and whipped out around a foot of dead bowel. (Look up twisted bowel) basically a section of intestine double-twists on itself and blocks the intestine as well as cutting the blood supply to the section of bowel.

When we next seen her on high dependency, she was loads better but they weren't happy with her blood oxygen level so she wore a mask. The mask wasn't doing the trick so they swapped it to an inflatible helmet, still no good so they knocked her out again and put her on a ventilator in intensive care for a week where she swelled all over like a balloon due to sepsis.

Apparently these after-effects were due to her shitty lifestyle, but the bowel problem was fuck all. It could happen to you or me today. So listen up fatties, smokers and drinkers (I tick all three boxes) You may not need to wait for the heart attack or lung cancer. A random illness may just be enough to fuck you right over.

Apols for length & lack of funneh's.

GC
(Greencloud Wanted to go fishing on, Sun 1 Aug 2010, 0:17, Reply)