It’s been a long break since I last posted on 1 January, but here I am again. It’s been a bit traumatic, with two ambulance rides to hospital and one extended stay, four and a half weeks. I’m home again (back on Wed 5 March, I think) and I’m getting terrific home assistance in a TCP (Transitional Care Package) from a company called Brightwater.

But let’s go back to the beginning. I’m having trouble remembering the sequence, but I had a C/T scan in the middle of January in Clarkson. It showed major deterioration of the spine, just age-based, not the result of any injury, but especially the L3 vertebra on the right side has a fracture.

A week or so after that, the pain became so severe that I had to call an ambulance. I was crying with pain in the ambulance.

But the warnings of the ambo guys were true. They had warned me against going to Joondalup Hospital. They said, “You’ll go to the end of the queue and you could be there for seven hours or more.” Well, that’s what happened, except worse. We arrived at 2pm. The queue was v-e-r-y l-o-n-g, so after a few minutes, they put me in a wheelchair and wheeled me into the triage area. And there I stayed for the next 13 hours! They did give me a pain relief tablet at about 8pm I think, and that helped, but everyone was called ahead of me. It became clear that pain is not considered an emergency. Anyone with a sore toe was called ahead of me.

At around midnight I couldn’t stand it any more and I wheeled myself toward the doors. I figured I’d had all I could take and would get a taxi home. But a nurse came and said, “What are you doing? Where are you going?” I told her I couldn’t take it any more and she turned me around and said it wouldn’t be much longer. She gave me a bottle of water from the vending machine and a round of sandwiches.

Well, I sat there for another three hours before they called for me. It was 3am before I was finally seen by the doctors. They gave me strong pain tablets and I lay on that uncomfortable bed for another 9 hours until they discharged me at midday!! What an ordeal. I do not want to go to Joondalup Hospital again.

When I finally was wheeled out to the discharge area, still in the wheelchair. the first taxi refused to take me! He didn’t want to take the wheelchair. But I wasn’t going to take it home, it belonged to the hospital. He didn’t stop to ask. I had to phone for another cab, and it turned out to be an Uber.

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The next emergency was on Monday 10 February. This sounds crazy, but at some point over that weekend, I found myself seated in my toilet. But unfortunately, I couldn’t get up. I just couldn’t lift myself. I was drifting in and out of consciousness or sleep, unaware of what time it was or even what day. I think I went into the toilet on Friday evening some time. My theory is that I went to bed on Friday night, then got up for a wee during the night, sleepwalking, unaware of what I was doing, and was unable to get up to return to bed. It’s never happened before or since.

So I was there for 2½ days. No food or drink, so I was very dehydrated. In fact by the time I got to the hospital, I was experiencing rhabdomyolysis, the breakdown of muscle in the absence of food. Not that I would have known – I was unconscious. I have no memory of it, anyway. I remember being pulled out of the toilet by the ambo guys on the Monday morning, but nothing more until waking up on the table in the ED.

How was I rescued? Luckily I had a tradesman on an appointment due on the morning of Monday 10 Feb. He was due in at 9am to install new handrails in the shower and toilet (!) and long handrails in the small passageway. I knew he was coming and that I needed to unlock the front door, but I also knew I couldn’t do it.

At 9am I heard him knock and I had to yell out, “I can’t come to the door!” Luckily, he was a clever guy. He went through the side gate, then for some reason I’d left a sliding door to my patio open. Caramba! How’s that for luck? So he was able to get into the house. I remember being asked how long I’d been there. Three days, I said. Interesting that I knew this.

Next thing I knew was his attempt to pull me off the toilet seat, unsuccessfully. I’m very heavy. Then some time later, I felt myself being pulled off onto a small metal chair. After that, I remember nothing until waking on a trolley in the hospital ED, being asked questions, having a catheter inserted. Ugh.

Next thing I knew I was in a ward bed. I had a bad graze on my right knee, of unknown cause, and a bad pressure sore on my left buttock. This took a lot of dressings and at least three weeks to get close to healing.

So from then it was about four days in this acute bed on the fourth floor. I have to say, I was not too happy with the nursing, by which I mean that although I tried not to call a nurse too often, when I did need a nurse, they were very slow coming, taking up to half an hour. Then I noticed that once I made my request, they didn’t come back. They were just too short staffed! I don’t blame the nurses, they were just too busy. Here’s an example:

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Then they moved me down to the Rehabilitation Ward on the ground floor. I had a private room and as I said once or twice “hot and cold running nurses”. It was incredible. I started joking about it, that every shift resulted in a fresh nurse. There were so many! I like to try to remember names, but I gave up after a while as, each day, each shift produced a new nurse. Not quite, there were a couple of regulars, but only a couple.

I had a motorised bed, of course, so I was able to lower it to swing my legs out and put my feet on the floor, then raise it to make it easier to stand up. I had a walker to move around and I had to be very careful.

I must say how much I liked the food. It was a diabetic balanced diet and wow, it sure got the bowels working regularly. Lots of beans and high fibre vegetables. And look at this:

I also realised that there’s a special “upper class” menu for private patients, which includes steak, pork cutlet, pan fried reef fish and best of all, pan fried salmon. That was my favourite. It was even supplied with Hollandaise sauce on one occasion.

But unfortunately the diabetes police were too smart for me and the Hollandaise sauce was taken off the menu, and most of the other fancy menu items were crossed out. Grrr. But I must say, I enjoyed the food for the whole stay.

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Obviously the more time you spend on a bed in a hospital, the worse your physical condition becomes. In fact they tell you you’ve become “deconditioned”. I can tell you, it’s a bugger! The result is that I’ve lost a lot of my muscle strength, especially my thigh muscles, my quadriceps. That makes it very difficult to get up from chairs and it badly affects my balance. The result is, I effectively can’t walk. I have to use a 4-wheel walker. That’s a big help, but I always have a feeling that I might fall.

The result is that I’ve developed a phobia about leaving the house. Apart from a few visits to the doctor at the medical centre, I haven’t been “out” since July last year. My brother comes here on Mondays and so I schedule my doctor appointments for Monday mornings. We take the Honda and Ian loads my walker into the back, then unloads it and helps me wheel my way into the waiting room. This works well, but I sure wish I could be independent.

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Once I got home on Wednesday 12 March courtesy of brother Ian, I found that I’ve been assigned a TCP, Temporary Care Package from the Brightwater Group. They’ve taken over from Amana Living, unfortunately, as I quite liked Amana. But it seems that any break of seven days or more negates your contract.

So it’s a whirlwind of visitors from Brightwater, at least one carer each day and usually more; physiotherapist, occupational therapist, cleaner (only once per fortnight unfortunately), social worker, and so on. I like it. Having lived alone for so long, I’m finding I’ve become a chatterbox. I can’t stop talking! I hope I haven’t become excessively talkative and I try to let the other person talk, but I confess I’m becoming garrulous, as I used to find with Dad as he got older. He could talk non-stop for ten minutes or more, but I didn’t mind, he was my father, after all.

By the way, I’m 78 now, the same age as he was when he died and the same age as he was when I used to sit and let him talk. How about that?

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I must add, somehow my name was picked up by a group called People Who Care and a series of visits commenced by a volunteer who comes and visits every Friday. It’s completely voluntary, but it’s by a lady called Nat (Natalie) and we have become quite close friends. I am extremely grateful for her visits, especially when she was coming to the hospital, and I can “talk the leg off the table” with her, so to speak. She brings me a little gift of mint chocolate and I’ve discovered sugar free cake to go with our coffee. Nice!

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* So here’s where I explain the asterisk about my sister Maxine. She had had cancer since early 2001, non-Hodkins lymphoma. She fought it for all these years but it finally claimed her life on 1 February this year. She was 73; she would have been 74 on 26 March.

Unfortunately, I held a huge grudge against her ever since she wrote her awful letter to the doctors at Perth Clinic on 3 September 2013. In the letter, she made utterly false accusations against me, mainly that I had made threats against her children! Can you imagine the shock I felt when accused of that? That’s about the worst accusation that can be made against a man, because the woman is always believed, whereas the man’s denials are not.

Therefore, for years I was not sure I would be able to attend her funeral.

Well, in the end, the decision was made for me: I was in the Joondalup Hospital with a fractured vertebra, unable to walk. I decided to write a short eulogy to be read out at the funeral, apologising for my absence and my brother said it went well.

That leaves the question, why did she do it? Why did she write such a damaging letter? The only answer I can think of is severe misandry, hatred of men due to the things that have happened to her during her life. But to attack her own brother in this way?

So there you go. This has been a rather traumatic period, from June last year 2024 to now April 2025. I won’t say I’m badly affected (well, I really am!) but it ain’t fun. I don’t think it will end. Pacemaker, CCF (congestive cardiac failure), fractured vertebrae, chronic pain, loss of mobility. Ugh!