In patient anger
I am speaking to Anita, who is stuck in her hospital bed, as I write this. She is ranting and raving, driven half mad with frustration. She feels trapped in here with a bunch of idiots who broke her leg. She says she is very, very angry. It is hard for me to get her to calm down. I tell her that she won’t get any extra help by shouting at people, but apparently it helps her. She thinks the staff don’t understand that she has brain injury. I don’t know what information they hold on Anita but I wonder if its a full set of records. One condition is treated as the priority, at the moment that is her hip.
She has sudenly screamed out, apparently she went into a spasm. As I watch them administer a bedpan she shouts out in agony. She then gets very angry and shouts at them that they don’t undestand brain injury. She’s difficult for the nurses, she’s hard for me to communicate with but it’s a culmination of everything that has gone before. It’s totally understandable, the way she sees it is that she went into addenbrookes hospital in 2003 as a healthy 38 yr old independant woman and they left her with brain injury, now a period of eye treatment in Stoke Mandaville has resulted in total imobilisation. There are other people down the corridor screaming also. It is a mixed surgical ward and they are very busy.
One of her difficulties today is that she was getting some pain relief from a mechanical drip but she says it came out of her hand at lunchtime and was switched off. It wasn’t put back so it probably means she hasn’t had as much pain relief as she neded. They have just come with some drug, I think it’s called oramol a form of morphine. She asked the nurses, with her usual sarcasm, if they had been to Bolivia to get the drugs, given the time that they took. I end up leaving after argument, I feel I can’t visit her tomorrow and told her, I need time to myself, I don’t feel guilty but I feel sad with myself that I can’t keep up the visits like I used to. At times I feel I am running on empty.