Post Op – Day 3
Sunday August 31st 2008
Today is our wedding anniversary, but we certainly had never envisaged spending it in San Jaime, but as the day dawned early as usual, we had already resigned ourselves to it. Breakfast and lunch passed by uneventfully, with the usual visits from the nurses toing and froing, changing drips and doing the vitals. Television pre-pay ticket ran out, so had to purchase a new one, seven more euros to get us through the day. Another doctor comes to poke and prod Derek – at least we think he was a doctor, but he looked more like the boiler-man just come up from the basement and helping the doctors out. Anyway he gives Derek the once over, pronounces him fit and tells him he can go home. Derek asks when, thinking he means tomorrow. “Now” says the doctor. “Come back in a week to see Doctor Gomez”. So the drips are pulled out and the central line removed and all we have to do is pack up and leave. I hand the still unused telly ticket over to the nurse as I am sure someone will be able to use it. Helpfully, they order us a wheelchair taxi, and with Derek still in pyjama bottoms, we leave the hospital just as the taxi draws up outside. How’s that for timing? By 4pm we are home again. So a pretty good wedding anniversary after all.
Later in the evening my brother, Geoff, rings me, strange that I thought, he generally only rings at Christmas. He is ringing with bad news. Our eldest sister, Pamela, died yesterday. I did not even know she was ill, but by the strangest coincidence, she had been diagnosed with kidney cancer around the same time as Derek. They told her it was operable, but it was much further advanced than Derek’s (thank heaven for those kidney stones) and she collapsed on Saturday and died an hour later before they were able to treat her.