Thursday 6 December 2007

Hospitalised....

Yesterday I got taken to hospital.

I was working my train through the countryside as normal when I started to suffer a really bad pain in my back, sweating and also vomiting - none of which are things you really want to be doing when you are driving a train at 75mph!

Anyway, after a rather foolish attempt to carry on after the first attack I saw sense and called for an ambulance, and ended up being rushed to hospital by the paramedic, being topped up with painkillers every so often in a failed attempt to deaden the pain...
  • Interesting element #1: Out here we don't tend to have so many ambulances; what we have are "community support vehicles", which translate into English as a large van full of ambulance kit and a single paramedic; I suppose they can staff twice as many of these as they can ambulances. If you're walking wounded, as I was, you also get to have a front seat ride on blues-and-twos through the countryside, along main roads and through the nearest large town, during which you can see just how bad British car drivers are at noticing what is happening around them and reacting to it - or, worse still, how they try to take advantage of the road space cleared by those few road users who do pull out of the way of the emergency vehicle.
  • Interesting element #2: A couple of weeks ago I was in Vienna, changing trains. Walking out of the station in towards the city centre, I heard a two-tone siren behind me. It gave two blasts, dee-dah-dee-dah, and was switched off. But... all the cars coming towards me pulled over, and then so did all the cars travelling away from me. And then an ambulance came past using only its blue lights, with all the traffic in both directions carefully giving it room to pass. Can you imagine that happening in this country? After yesterday's front seat experience, I can't!
Anyway, we arrived at the hospital, I got put on a trolley and taken into A&E.
A&E at that hospital was the same as every A&E I've ever been in: lots of waiting around and very little information. Eventually, after a couple of hours of lying painfully on a stretcher, a doctor arrived and confirmed the paramedic's initial diagnosis: I'd gotten myself a kidney stone.



At some time whilst I was in the hospital, the pain stopped. I don't know why; perhaps the painkillers the paramedic had given finally kicked in, perhaps the doctor's poking around had caused it to break up or moved it on, or perhaps the stone had finished its painful journey to wherever it was going - but whatever the reason I was extremely happy, I can tell you!

After about 5 hours at the hospital I was released and taken back home by my boss who'd driven out to make sure I was OK. And here I am today, still with no further pain (thankfully!)

I've done a bit of reading on the NHS and other associated websites today, and I now know that I need to drink a lot more water (or, at least, drink a lot more water at home - at work I usually drink 2-3 litres a day anyway), that kidney stones don't usually hurt whilst they're in the kidney but only when they start moving down towards your bladder and out of your body as they make their bid for freedom, and also now that I've had one I can expect to have others in the future.
Hopefully not too often!

What has been really nice, though, is the amount of people who've asked after me to see if I'm OK. Apparently the railway grapevine has worked with its usual speed and people all over the place have heard that I'd been rushed into hospital, and quite a few of them have been asking my colleagues if I'm OK.

It's nice to discover that people who barely know you care enough to ask after you, and it bucks you up rather a lot....

So, what happens now?
Well, I'm back at work from tomorrow, although I've agreed with my boss that I'll act as a standby driver for a couple of days (no real hardship for the company as I was already booked to be standby for three of my next four working days anyway) so that if there is a recurrence I will at least be at the station where medical assistance can arrive quickly and I won't be abandoning a train out there on the tracks with chaos resulting!
Hopefully, though, this particular stone has gone and it'll be a long time before I suffer another...

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