Deja Bloody Voo

You couldn’t make this up.

As I said last week, I’m working on a sort of mini-series telling the whole Tinman blackout saga, the plan being to post one part each day next week and finish on Thursday, the day on which my pacemaker will be one year old.

I’ve written as far as Part 3, the day I collapsed twice in the office & an ambulance was called. Part 4, which I started on yesterday morning on the DART, concerns my madcap day after this ambulance brought me to the Mater Hospital A&E Department.

Therefore I spent yesterday morning from 6.15 to 7am writing about how on that day I was bundled into the ambulance, how GoldenEyes came with me, and what happened during our eight-hour time at the hospital.

So when, just three hours later,  I was sitting in yet another ambulance on the way to the Mater, with GoldenEyes again sitting beside me, all I could think was “Un.Bee.Fucking.Leevable”.

Our company reckons that each department should have a 5-minute “huddle” every morning, to discuss our plans and issues for the day. Everybody stands at this meeting in order to encourage it to be brief (don’t get me started about what I think of the value of these huddles, I’ve got heart problems you know). Anyway, yesterday morning I was standing at ours when I suddenly felt really light-headed and said “can I sit down?” Since the events of last year I can pretty well sit down, lie down or suddenly announce that I feel like going home any time I like, so down I sat, but when my turn came to speak I was half-way through a sentence when I suddenly stopped and said “actually, I really do feel crap”.

The meeting was ended and I went to the kitchen to make some tea. Possibly because it was very warm there, I felt again that I had to sit down quite suddenly and GE, who was now following me everywhere like a tigress minding her cub (except I don’t think tigresses say “I think you should go home. I think you should go home” over and over again) said “That’s it, I’m calling a doctor”. I tried to protest but by now she had been joined by MyAgeGirl and SuperSlimMum in a kind of girlband nagging chorus so I just muttered “Oh alright, but don’t tell everyone”. She went off for a few minutes and came back and said “Ok, the ambulance will be here soon”.

“The what?,” I said. “Don’t worry,” she said, ” I’ll get your coat and your bag, we’ll go downstairs and meet them, and no-one will know”. What she had forgotten, of course, was that it was an ambulance she had called, and they don’t hang about, so by the time she got my stuff they had already arrived, and two ambulance men suddenly burst into our office yelling “we’re looking for a Mr Tin Man”. Heads were popping up like moles in the Whack-a-Mole arcade game all over the office as I slunk out the front door. Just in case any of the office hadn’t noticed what was going on, the crew had parked the ambulance facing the wrong way on a one-way street, so they had to turn on their siren as they drove off against the traffic.

Though we weren’t in the waiting area as long as last time, since I had no massive head wound to add to my problems this time, all human life was there again. A guy in a tracksuit, whose last wash was possibly when they poured water on his head at his christening, said down beside me at one point and yelled into his mobile “naoh, I’m in the fuckin’ hospital… yeah the burd was gettin’ up off the jacks & she tripped on her tracksuit…. naoh, yesterday, but dis mornin’ her foot was bloated….taxi? naoh, we rang a fuckin’ ambulance…”

In the middle of it all though, I was called to a consulting room and on the way I passed a woman sobbing uncontrollably in a corridor, and was reminded forcefully that, while I had had a Victorian-ladylike swoon, and smellyman and his burd had been too cheap to pay for a taxi, some people who arrive in an ambulance have graver problems, and that the poor person that this woman had accompanied will not be writing light-hearted posts this morning.

Anyway, now that I’ve killed the mood I’m going to stop. Whatever happened had nothing to do with my heart, and is not serious. I went back to the hospital, to cardiology at 8.30 this morning and had a complete check on my pacemaker, and I’ve an appointment later today with my own doctor to discuss my medication & whether it might have caused what happened, and I’m gonna use this opportunity to ask more about the whole depersonalised issue, & see if maybe some sort of counselling might help.

Just think. If I have to go to a Mentaller Doctor, you’ve all my reports about that to look forward to.