Almost a year ago to the day I had the mother of body dramalamas. I've had many body meltdowns in my life - but this was a whole new level of cHaOs
On May Day 2025, (while Hastings danced and revelled at Jack in the Green), my transplanted pancreas and duodenum (small bowel) decided to detach themselves from my body, die, go necrotic, and spew infection and bowel contents into my abdomen. I was ambulanced from Hastings to Cambridge (| remember the blurry blue lights flashing across the van's ceiling getting fainter and fainter as sepsis took hold), where I underwent three big emergency operations. They had to remove my now dead organs (a blood clot, they suspect), get all the infection out, then re-attach and re-design my digestive system.
I was kept unconscious between operations, where | spent almost 6 weeks trapped on another planet of intense, terrifying and upsetting delirium: scenarios that feel so real, totally inescapable.
Between tripping out, I just remember pain, tears, and lots of enthusiastic physios, often merging with the false and scary reality inside my head.
I ballooned up to a million times my size, all fluid from the drips and IVs and magic potions working hard to keep me alive (so many machines.), the fluid unable to be dialysised out of me for nearly 6 weeks because my heart wasn't strong enough to cope. (I still needed dialysis throughout all this... they opened me up three times, could've squished a new lil kidney in for me no? I had to wear gigantic maxi incontinence pads on my wrists for weeks as every few seconds water droplets would drip out of my many many IV puncture wounds. I still have scars from where the dampness mixed with the dressings would tear my skin.
I spent 7 weeks in intensive care, a fever dream.
Two weeks then on the main ward before going to live with and be cared for by my parents for another two months near the hospital. I started a new dialysis centre (no rest for the wicked i ) ) and
began the long journey of re-learning to walk again
It was A LOT, pals. My open wounds have become new scars, my muscles are returning slowly, St Leonards hills are both my saviour and my nemesis. I've always known life to be short, a silver lining of growing up with a life limiting condition, but l've never had an experience where so clearly afterwards have I felt the shimmering fragility - both terrifying and beautiful - of life, and the need to really search for joy whenever and wherever | can.
Now home, I stare out to sea and breathe in cold air to the bottom of my lungs, and hope so much this feeling stays with me. I was told if I hadn't gone to A&E when I did, if | left it until the morning, I wouldn't have been well enough to have the operations.I wouldn't be here right now. I'm so thankful to my parents, how insanely lucky l am to receive this love and care from them. They're amazing. I thank our national fucking health system, the best thing we have: my nurses and docs and surgeons and so many many more who make up a team - everyone it takes to bring someone back to life from the brink and enable them to get home, live, hug their cat, and scream their soul out across moody waves Addenbrookes is truly a fantastic place, once again Frankenstein-ing me like the G's they are. Seek out joy my friends :)
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