It took six days to catch cabin fever. That's what the nurse called it when she asked me if I was suffering any pain and I told her no, just the pain of confinement. It's also called going stir crazy, but basically it just means you're bored out of your brain. It can happen for lots of reasons, but in Rabid's case it started with a sore knee, and a visit to the doctor for some magic pills.
But the doc wasn't having any of that, and we've been in a hospital bed ever since. It seems the sentence for being foolish enough to allow this situation to develop is one week's confinement with time off for good behaviour. Of course Rabid was never likely to qualify for time off if the requirement was being well behaved.
Apparently when your knee is the size of a football they don't hang about waiting for things to improve with Savlon and a Band-Aid. We know. We tried. However, the first few days in captivity are always entertaining, as with any new experience. But watching the local octagenarians trying to recover their health enough to escape the hospital halls soon left us hoping for a sudden early demise rather than succumbing to any lingering lurgy when our time comes.
The old girl in the next bed snores like a diesel tractor while the bloke across the way plays tuneful flatulence solos all night long. The back-passage trombonist combined with the diesel droner almost drown out the incessant beeping from the IV machines announcing their various problems, which can be due to a lack of fluids but sometimes it seems, they're just suffering plain boredom like their patients.
\In the background the elevators play a low mournful chime to announce their arrival, as though they're apologising for not disgorging sufficient visitors this trip. During the waking hours the nurses punctuate the boredom by dragging a machine which looks like a close cousin of WALL-E over to the bedside to measure our vital signs to make sure we haven't expired without them noticing.
Everything is automated these days. No more stethoscopes, stop watches, hand pumps nor glass thermometers under the tongue. Nope, now it's high-tech heaven in hospitals. Although the electronic ear thermometer does cause the doctors total confusion. They wave it around our ear and curse when they can't get a reading. The nurses don't have that problem. They just insert the cone in one ear then push until it protrudes from the other ear and they get a reliable reading every time.
At the start of every conversation the nurses and doctors make a point of asking us for our name and date of birth and whether we're allergic to anything. You'd think they could hire medical staff who weren't suffering from Alzheimers themselves.
One thing you can't complain about is the hospital food. We know. We tried. But it's nothing if not frequent. Every time you turn around - well, every time you roll over in bed - it seems there's another tray of food on the table. They give you a menu a day in advance to choose from, but what's delivered bears no resemblence to what you ordered. We reckon it's part of the plot to convince you you're not in full control of your faculties. Identifying the components provides some light relief, particularly since you have to do it without using your sense of taste. And no, there's nothing wrong with that particular function.
But the real problem is that we can't run a shop from a hospital bed. Not that we should have to of course, that's what the nephew's there for, but after a few days spent observing the inner workings of the healthcare industry we discovered there's no point trying to do a deal for some new PCs while you're on an IV drip. About the same time the nephew started hitting the shop walls - with his head. He started calling us on the mobile, which is strictly verboten here in healthcare hell, so we had to put the phone on silent ring, and pretend we were just using it to play Tetris under the covers.
Pretty soon the battery got eaten out so we resorted to texting instructions. It took a whole day to realise the nephew was taking our predictive text-based instructions literally so we're not looking forward to seeing the stock situtation or even some of the things he's ordered.
But we're getting out of here tomorrow come what may. And it's not because the infection's all cleared up either. When you start looking forward to the hopsital food they just expel you before they find themselves in breach of some United Nations convention or other.
Gotta go! WALL-E's cousin approaching!
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