I was woken at 4.30am Sunday morning by the endearing sound of my husband being violently sick in the bathroom. He kindly offered to go downstairs, but then proceeded to be regularly sick in the downstairs loo, which has a squeaky door, so every time I managed to doze off eeearek and I was awake again. At 6am I finally gave up and went downstairs to ask how he was and was there anything I could do, to which he responded "call an ambulance". This elicited a sense of deja vu; the scenario was an almost exact repetition of last summer's appendicitis episode. As the offending body part had been removed then, at least we knew what wasn't the matter.
Rather than waste time and cause gossip, I quickly showered, dressed and ushered Phil (still in dressing gown) and Annie into the car and sped off with them to Peterborough District Hospital. I really wanted to go to Hinchinbrooke as it's a nice hospital, but Phil insisted on Peterborough because it was closer. Peterborough Hospital is perfectly ghastly; a concrete block with few windows and covered in filth; fortunately all the doctors, nurses and staff we met were perfectly lovely. Phil spent the whole journey fidegeting, groaning and occasionally puking into the empty equivite tub he was nursing. He gave an oscar winning performance of being on death's door, and I seriously began to worry he was having a heart attack.
On arrival at the hospital I dropped him straight off at the entrance and went to find a parking place. Leaving an irate Annie alone in the car I found what appeared to be the main entrance of the hospital, although it was locked, and there were huge red-lettered signs everywhere telling people not to enter if they were suffering from nausea or vomiting. I followed a woman in who knew the code, and she promptly disappeared leaving me in an empty atrium wondering where on earth my husband had disppeared to. I wandered up and down a couple of empty corridors, and finally came across an elderly lady in dressing gown and slippers who pointed me back the way I came. So I found myself back in the still-empty atrium, beginning to wonder if I was dreaming this whole episode. At one point a young woman with a baby in a pram appeared and asked me where X-Ray was. Not knowing I pointed to a sign saying X-Ray, and magically a doctor (or perhaps radiographer) in a burgundy-coloured tunic appeared out of a side door, called the name of the woman and they disappeared together through the door before I could ask where my husband might be hiding.
By now I was imagining various pessimistic scenarios, including:
1. Phil had not managed to get through the locked door, had tried to find me again and was now lying dead in a gutter somewhere.
2. Phil had been turned away because he was experiencing nausea and vomiting and was lying dead in a gutter somewhere.
3. Phil had somehow managed to find someone who worked in the hospital, had collapsed and was currently in resuss or the morgue.
As I pondered these outcomes, I followed a different corridor and suddenly came upon a cubical stuffed full of doctors and nurses. I poured out my story, one of the nurses referred to a clipboard, and said "He's in the waiting room". As I had assumed the atrium (which had a reception desk and was full of chairs) was the waiting room I asked what she meant. It turns out that the waiting room I had discovered, the one by what looked like the main entrance, was the outpatients waiting room not the A & E waiting room. She pointed me down a thin corridor and I emerged in the right waiting room, where my husband sat in his dressing gown with his equivite tub still looking as though he was about to pop his clogs any second.
After a wait of about 45 minutes we were finally called through to see a triage nurse and Phil put his heart and soul into an oscar winning performance of someone who is unlikely to survive more than ten minutes. The poor nurse had to keep asking him to sit up on the chair rather than sliding off it onto the floor or keeling over backwards. It seemed to work, as we were hurried through to the A&E ward and another nurse came and attached Phil to an ECG machine.
Fortunately, despite a poor first reading (Phil was still in the throes of his performance and couldn't keep his legs still) it seemed that his heart was fine. A nurse came back little later with some Gaviscon and painkillers, which Phil took then promptly threw up, so a little while after that the nurse came back again to insert a canula and take blood. Unfortunately for Phil this particular nurse was clearly a beginner at this, and stabbed him with shakey hands a couple of times before admitting defeat and asking another nurse to do it for her. After taking bloods, the nurse slowly inserted a syringe full of morphine, and Phil at last stopped writhing.
A charming young doctor appeared and asked questions and prodded about as doctors do. And the prognosis was......probably acid indigestion brought on by last night's curry (and when I thought about it later, initiated by the two plus litres of cola he drinks every day). Phil wasn't having any of this and insisted that it must be a peptic ulcer caused by a virus. Fortunately the medicine the doctor prescribed works for both conditions, so Phil can maintain his conviction that there must have been more wrong with him than a bit of heartburn.
As we then had an hour or so to wait for the blood results to come back, the doctor directed me to a nearby park and I took Annie for a run. The park was great - a huge field full of birds to chase and with the River Nene running through floated by swans for Annie to bark at (they hissed back). After half an hour walking around the park and a quick trip to Asda, I returned to find Phil asleep. A little while later the doctor came back with the blood results, proclaiming Phil to be fit as fiddle except for a bit dehydrated, so they attached a bag of saline to him and told us we could go when the bag was finished. As this would take about an hour I settled into the chair next to him and managed to fall asleep for a few minutes.
Finally the bag ran out, Phil was discharged and settled into the back seat of the car with an exhuberent Annie. We were home by 1pm and both of us (and Annie who sleeps with us as she can't be left alone for more than 5 minutes without tearing the house apart) managed to catch up on a little sleep during the afternoon. Phil is still poorly today but merely in intense pain rather than unbearable agony, so some improvement there.
