Well, Keeping On Top of Things Didn't Last Long

I'd barely clicked on Publish for my last post when the real life decided I needed a few short sharp lessons. I got sick - this happens when I try to do too much and keep going and ignore the warning signs and you'd think I'd have got this by now but, no, of course I haven't. So that meant hitting survival mode - which in my world is managing to do the washing so we don't run out of clothes and meals from the freezer then falling into bed again by mid morning and sleeping for hours for several days. This in turn meant I didn't get anything else done and there's a lot that needs to be done.

I'd recovered enough that I was thinking as I got up on Saturday that things were going to be tight but manageable. Then Real Life struck again when Pisces came into my office just after nine and said, 'Can you look at this?'

This turned out to be a very swollen and discoloured leg. He'd been having some pain for a couple of days but nothing dramatic and no swelling but now it was obviously serious. So we headed off to the Emergency Department where there were tests and examinations and then more tests and more examinations by different doctors when they decided that it was probably a DVT and started him on precautionary blood thinners.  But to be sure he had to go back the next day and have an ultrasound scan then it was back to the ED doctors. It was a DVT so he's been medicated and referred on the haematology department of the hospital.

He could have timed it better since we had quite a few hours to wait on the results of various blood tests as well as the scan results and he kept being bumped back as emergency after emergency came in but that was inevitable because the ED on the weekend is a very busy place. There were overdoses, sporting injuries - oh, so many sporting injuries, as well as all sorts of other health problems, some minor but many coming in by ambulance. ED cubicles are not the most private of places so whether we wanted to or not we now know all about the constipation problems of the lady opposite, the chest pain the quadruple bypass man was having, the back pain of another woman, that the hysterical crying of the young woman next door was because she was terrified of needles and that another man had gut pains to list but a few. You learn quite a lot sitting around in an ED I have to say.

That said, and while no one wants to spend the best part of two days hanging around in the ED - they're not the most comfortable places in the world - what I came away with, apart from a husband who has been very well taken care of and some random virus acquired from a coughing and spluttering patient in the waiting room, was how fortunate we are to be able to go to a public hospital ED, hand over our Medicare details and receive excellent treatment at no cost. We are so lucky to have this health care available.