Never Say Die. Lynne Barrett-Lee
Another nurse this time, who also saw blood. ‘Looks like your period has started,’ she said.
‘I know it has,’ I answered. ‘Another nurse has already put in a tampon.’
I wondered at this point if I might have had a leak. My periods, after all, were sometimes horrendously heavy. Not so. The nurse made a closer inspection and, inexplicably to me, started laughing. And this wasn’t just laughing, this was serious laughing. The sort of laughing that left her fighting for breath and helpless with her unexplained mirth. It was some time before she got herself sufficiently together that she was able to share the cause of the hilarity with me and all the other patients within earshot, who I didn’t doubt were listening intently by now.
‘It’s been put,’ she explained, her eyes still wet with tears, ‘in - how shall I put it? - the wrong orifice!’
I imagine she probably thought I too would find this funny. Indeed, in the telling - and it’s been something I’ve told, often - it generally makes people smile. But at the time I could no more have laughed about what happened than I could insert the wretched tampon myself from a position lying flat on the bed. My natural sense of humour about such things deserted me. I was wholly, toe-curlingly horrified. I simply couldn’t believe that there was a nurse on the ward (a nurse who looked about sixty) who either didn’t know where a tampon should go or, worse, cared so little for putting it where it belonged that she just shoved it anywhere it would go. Where, I thought wretchedly, would she put my next suppository? I felt violated. I’d been lying bleeding for two hours, with a tampon in my rectum, entirely unaware that anything was wrong.
I didn’t know the reason - could she really not have known? - but one thing became blindingly obvious. That the trust I’d put, of necessity, in all the carers around me was misplaced. Was mistaken.
Was gone.
Sport. The final frontier. Well, not exactly the final frontier. More the first, last and everything-in-between frontier. Sport, for people like me, or so it seemed, was the only frontier. At the very least, the only way forward.
Two weeks into my time at Rookwood Hospital, a way forward was something I very much needed to find. Confined to bed, however, the prospect looked tricky. I couldn’t move any part of my body beneath my nipples so there seemed little chance of my making any sort of bid for escape.
I had obviously had a number of shocks during the five or so weeks of my new life as a paraplegic. I had become somewhat battered, both physically and emotionally, and, or so I thought, somewhat inured to the relentless round of bad news my life seemed to have become. But there was more.
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