Soooo…. London Bridge Hospital.

22, Tooley St.  Right next to London Bridge station… and right next to a very high building… with a pointy top… that looks like a splinter of glass.

I wonder why they didn’t call that building The Splinter? …Instead of some other name ..?

I’m not allowed to eat anything today, pre surgery.

Theyve also told be to take various strong laxatives which would give me diarrhoea, and warned me to stay close to a toilet. It’s quite extraordinary to me that the hospital nurse that I had the consultation with didn’t talk about this stuff ( she just said to take the laxatives ).

How on earth am I supposed to rush to the loo when I feel the need?

For a start, I don’t ‘ feel the need’ , I feel nothing at all. What she is effectively ‘ condemning me to ‘ is 24 hours of soiling myself in my wheelchair…  that’s NOT going to happen, I can assure you.

I’m already doubting the expertise of the hospital staff.

This is how ******** up this flat is.
I’ve been in bed for 4 hours. I obviously am unable to move from this bed, or move much in the bed, at that.
No one has enquired after me, or spoken to me 🙂
And nobody will until my carer arrives tomorrow..

Just imagine that.
It’s an odd existence.

It’s  a fast forward to being in a home, and having no family that wants to visit, or perhaps having no family at all.

When I’m in hospital, it’ll be so much more fun than it is here.

Weird for sure, but true.

By contrast, this week 2 complete strangers have approached me and told me that they read this diary, and appeared to think well of me.  I have that  ‘ compensation ‘ at least.

Thanks to B**** for the amusing Pringle exchange.  Pringle may get become common slang for a bloke’s underpants.

‘ Oi, get yer Pringles off, and get into bed!’ ..?

Might catch on?

Essentially my current ‘ routine ‘ involves me sh****** the bed every morning, and then doing my best to clean up what I can’t feel, except with my hands. Lying in bed, I can just about reach to clean myself up, though it’s far from certain that I actually manage that very well with kitchen roll and baby wipes. Getting onto an actual toilet is something that I cannot do.

The District Nurses proved so poor at helping me that I abandoned their services 2 months ago, and self manage. My carer obviously helps in the final cleaning process, once she has arrived. Obviously nobody in my family would dream of assisting me, either. Actually I’m not even sure if they even know?

Living like this is obviously not a fantastic long term proposition, hence the desire for the colostomy. It’s not the greatest start to every day, but it is a necessity as the alternative is sh***** myself in my wheelchair.

Its all relative, isn’t it?

And I have only 2 more days of doing this.  That’s pretty good.

As Pringlegate rumbles on in this apartment, so I take on the words of the Bard about ‘ protesting too much ‘ .

So apparently they are not the property of you know who.. they aren’t mine though.

Neither are they my eldest’ s 15 year old boyfriend’s – way too big.

They’re not my STBE wife’s … she doesn’t wear men’s underwear  ( or does she ? )

Theyre not Lily’s.

They’re not Amber’s.

Apparantly I might have picked them up on my recent travels? One Saturday night in Southampton then, and I come back with an extra pair of pants. As I can’t actually reach the floor myself to collect pants, it must have been someone else that snuck them into my case.

I’m definitely going to have to investigate further, I can see.  The blindingly obvious answer is evidently completely wrong…..and I’m ever so sorry for having jumped to that conclusion.

🙂

Is your new life – surrounded by people who are nice to you and each other – going to seem really dull in comparison?

Officially single.

And it feels amazing 🙂

To Mike and Theresa for inviting me out on their family birthday lunch. Mike was *1 today and reckons he was in the same year as me in school.

No way, I say.. unless he was one of my teachers ?

Anyway, Happy Berfday Mr Smith.  I felt very honoured to be the only non family member there.

Russ

As referenced in my last post, I’ve tried my hand at online dating.  I deliberated a bit before trying it ( at the suggestion of a Mum from one of my daughters ‘ schools ) but then paid up for 6 months and dived ( well wheeled and then tipped  ) in.

Without my injury I can’t really have seen myself doing it – bit sad/ desperate etc – but you really don’t realise how completely ‘ normal ‘ this stuff has become, until you’re in it. Now when I’m out and I see two people talking in a bar or even a coffee shop and they don’t look as if they’re  familiar with each other, my default assumption is that they’re on an online date.

My reticence was for obvious reasons. Who the f*** would want to go out with a bloke in a bloody wheelchair ? I can’t stand the f****** thing, so how is anyone else, particularly an attractive female, going to find it at all likeable? To me, it was a case of an obvious date killer, so I absolutely did NOT put pictures of me in a wheelchair on my ‘ profile’ .  That’s not to say that I put pictures of me pre injury in, because I didn’t – they were all ( 5 ) of me after my accident, but not actually featuring the metal bits that now come with me.

What happens is that you get ‘ chat / meet requests ( or send them ) and then you start messaging each other on the app/site …

Well I’m fine with the chat stuff  ( as you might imagine ) but there comes a point where you just have to mention the minor detail of being paralysed from the chest down.  It kinda becomes necessary when the potential date talks about hill walking/ surfing/ having a bedroom in the attic.

I figured that it was best to pre write a few paragraphs about my history, and then copy and paste it into a message, before any actual date took place. I mean you can’t just turn up in a wheelchair and pretend it’s not there, can you?

Expecting to always get ‘the knock back ‘ every time I sent the copy and paste, I was amazed to find that actually…. women aren’t that shallow.  Given that men are definitely that shallow, I had pre-judged the other half of the population.

It wouldn’t be right to give any details away, but I can honestly say that all of my online date experiences have been lovely ( in other words that the girls/ladies have been lovely ). I’m not exactly hard to talk to, so it’s never awkward to talk to anyone, or hasn’t been so far… and i realised that my situation ref finding a cool and compassionate lady wasn’t anywhere near as dire as I thought it would be.

I have a female friend in a chair, who reports that for her ( and she IS a hotty ) it’s really not been a success – proof that men are FAR more f***** up about the chair thing than girls are – I mean how the hell is she going to hoover the stairs, right…?

I won’t be blogging about my dating, but suffice to say that I already have some very funny stories that I could tell… not bad stories (!) but definitely humorous ones.

Last night’s one was really cool. Who knows how my next one will be?

Wouldn’t it be funny if we bumped into Dani and Pringle in a bar…?!  Awks… as the kids might say… especially if I’m sporting his pants?

I went to the West End last night, to a play.

Ooh, there’s middle class of me. …

Victorian theatres were certainly not designed with wheelchairs and SCI in mind.  For a start, you really can’t put a wheelchair on a slope… Why’s that? Cos of the bloody wheels…. they are designed to go round and take the object on top of them down the gradient upon which they are placed.

For second, if the occupant of the chair has no core muscles, then he / she is always on the verge of falling out of the chair. It’s not like I can stick out my bloody legs to stop me, is it?

For a third, once in situ and with the brakes on, no one else can get past me. If I take the brakes off to try to move, then I fly down the slope and smash into the first object I meet….

For a fourth, please put the bloke in charge of the poor wheelies through some kind of training course so that he has the first clue about anything at all, rather than just being completely indifferent and hopeless in every way.

The play itself was great. All intellectual, for sure, but good. To start with i found the laughing out loud by a few people at ‘ jokes’ that just weren’t ever worth an audible outburst a bit annoying / confusing.. was I the only person in there who didn’t get that it was funny, I thought ? For some Out Loud Guffawers I think it’s definitely just an intellectual show off thing, but actually having got the gist, it was funny. It might have helped if I’d read the plot before going though, to give me some historical insight into James Joyce, the Dada movement, Lenin’s time in Zurich etc. Well… we didn’t do any of that in my school in Wales  ( for our sins )

Thanks to my online date for taking me – I owe you one. You may get Two Pints of Lager and a packet of Crisps as the return favour, but hey.

Picadilly Circus in the evening, with NOBODY looking where they’re going ( how can you, at the same time as looking at your Selfie Stick ) in a wheelchair is really not to be recommended. As a nerve calmer, it was shite, but as with all things post injury I just ultimately have to suck it up and get over myself.. and smile.