What do you do when you get a message from your doctor's surgery, saying the doctor "would like to speak to you urgently"?My exciting and unexpected adventure in hospital, summer 1998.
What do you do when you get a message from your doctor's surgery, saying the doctor "would like to speak to you urgently"?
I got that message one day in April 1998. I had almost forgotten going to the surgery a few weeks before with a minor complaint about back pain, which since that appointment had not troubled me anyway. But there was the message, saying please call the secretary back as soon as possible.
I did.
"Ah, Mr Turnbull, yes, we've been waiting for you to call. Can you come in to see the doctor?"
"Um, yeah - when?" I asked, thinking of getting an appointment the following week.
"Well, now, if you can."
Lucky for me the surgery is just a few minutes walk from the house. I went round.
My doctor said there was no accounting for the back pain thing, but, he wondered, what was this, er, lump that the X-ray had revealed in my chest?
Lump, says I?
Hmm, says he. "We need to find out what it is. We may need to whip it out."
Fast forward to May 1998. I got a letter saying a bed had been booked for me in Guy's Hospital, London, and could I please remember to bring a pair of pyjamas.
I didn't even own a pair of pyjamas.
Since my chat with the good doctor near my home, I had seen various consultants and specialists and medical folk. The general consensus was that the lump was an overgrown thymus gland.
When you're a baby you need this gland to make antibodies, but as you grow up it is supposed to shrink to nothing, as in theory you don't need it any more.
Whatever the lump was, no-one was happy about it staying in there. Even if it was completely benign, they said, it was too big to ignore. If it grew bigger in future, they warned, it could interfere with other organs - like my windpipe.
This was just a little bit worrying.
The lump was located right under my breast bone. Removing it would mean opening up my chest, like they do in heart surgery, pulling it out, and stitching everything back together again.
This would mean up to 10 days in hospital, and three months off work, I was told. My employers were very supportive about it. They just said, go away, get better, come back when you're ready. Good job, because things just started to get weirder...
I went into Guy's Hospital on the Sunday afternoon. I expected it to be buzzing with activity, but it was completely dead. No-one was around, and the corridors were deathly silent.
My wife Kate and I timidly put our heads round the door of Dorcas Ward, after about 20 minutes of pacing through the silent corridors. This was the dingiest, darkest corner of the hospital we had yet seen, and the first sign of any staff.
When we arrived it was patient rest period - or afternoon siesta. It was full of old people snoring.
All of them had drips and tubes and strange objects hanging out of their beds or bodies. Having never been into hospital for anything before, it was very, very odd to see all this stuff and think I would be in a similar state 24 hours later.
Duty Doctor Bikram booked me in and told me what would happen. I was to have a a median sternotomy (cut in the chest) the next morning, and I was third on the list. He could not say exactly what time I would be done, just that it would probably be mid-morning.
Kate and I sat around for hours, feeling a bit silly sitting in the ward, the two of us fit as fiddles, everyone else in a dreadful state.
Visiting time arrived, and various friends and relatives streamed in to see their loved ones. We sat there, looking ridiculously healthy and feeling very out of place.
I was asked to go and have an X-ray. They seemed to want to X-ray me every five minutes. A porter, a very young-looking teenager, arrived with a wheelchair to take me down to the X-ray department. I stood up and said I was fine, I could walk, but instantly saw the look on his face - I was upsetting the system. Patients obviously Do Not Walk Down To X-ray, They Are Pushed There By A Porter, his eyes told me. I shrugged and got in the chair, and off we went, Kate tagging along on foot.
X-Ray was another dingy, dark corridor. Silent. A little boy with his arm in a sling waiting in a corner, me and two other blokes sitting on wheelchairs, lined up in the corridor like garden gnomes.
My porter met another porter there, and they chatted and listened to their walkie-talkies. Pagers hung from their belts.
After I was penetrated by radiation they wheeled me back upstairs. Kate and I sat around for a bit longer, but it was getting late, and somewhat dull for Kate, so I made her go home.
The supper brought round was awful. Everything you have ever heard about hospital food, but worse. Cold, rubbery food, no incentive to anyone trying to get better.
I had quite a good bed, in the corner right by the entrance. So no neighbour on my right, and an empty bed to my left. The fella opposite me also seemed to be a new arrival, a middle-aged man with a large tummy. We waved hello.
That night I found it hard to get to sleep. Not because I was nervous, but because another patient in the ward, old Tom, kept everyone awake by calling the nurses constantly.
Poor guy, I think he was a bit senile. He kept asking for them to take his pyjamas trousers off, and they told him over and aver again, "They're already off, Tom."
"Oh but I'm so uncomfortable," he moaned.
Eventually I dropped off to sleep, my head stuffed under one of the pillows, thinking of Kate and wishing I was at home.
Operation day.
I woke very early, about 6.30, and got up straight away, then sat on the chair by my bed, listening to Radio 4 on my personal stereo.
There were butterflies in my stomach and I could only eat a tiny bit of breakfast. At this stage I was still the fittest person on the ward, so I toddled off to have a shower. Everywhere in the toilet area there were bottles of pink antiseptic soap called Hibiscrub, which I was told to wash with all over. It reminded me of school.
The nurse gave me a surgical gown, and casually said, "Slip that on."
It was a big pale green apron with two tie-up string things on each side. How the hell do you put it on, I wondered?
I put it on, tying the string things round my back, and hopped back into bed. Then I saw the nurse talking to Mr Big Tum opposite me - "No, you put your gown on with the strings tied at the front," she told him.
I quietly slipped back to the bathroom and put mine on correctly.
A doctor appeared, surrounded by a bunch of other doctors. Dr Cameron, the consultant surgeon who would be dealing with me.
"I'll see you again later, Mr Turnbull," he said, wagging his finger and smiling.
I sat reading a book until they called me, at what must have been about 10.30 or 11. I was very nervous now, major tummy butterflies, feeling very silly in my gown.
The porters arrived with a bed, which I climbed into, then they wheeled me off to the operating theatre - one of the strangest trips of my life. There were two of them, taking turns to try and make me feel calm with amusing jokes ("Don't worry, I hear they're experts here, mate, they won't spill a drop") and chatting to one another.
As if in a movie, I stared up at the strip lights passing by in the ceiling.
To my surprise we went down, into the bowels of the hospital. Much of Guy's is a huge tower, and I had expected to go up it.
We arrived. In the anaesthetic room a nice chap reassured me that everything would be fine, while his colleagues strapped me down and stuck needles into the back of my left hand. I was shaking quite a lot now, scared shitless.
"Are you cold?" they asked. Doh. "No, just nervous," I said.
That's normal, they smiled. Don't worry, everything's going to be fine. They pushed me through plastic doors into the theatre. I hadn't noticed any injection, but something must have gone into my blood because suddenly my head was fuzzy and light.
I looked around. I noticed TV monitors, and the big operating lights, presently off, hanging above me.
Then my limbs began to stretch off into the distance, and my head felt like soup. I looked at a nurse who had surgical gown and mask on.
"Gosh, I'm beginning to feel quite light-headed already," I said. I think.
Z O N K. I was out.
I think there's someone standing over me. I think they're saying, "Giles, are you OK, can you hear me?"
I could be wrong.
Everything is very, very fuzzy, hazy, blurred. There's people around and voices but I really haven't a clue what's going on.
PAIN.
Shit, it feels like someone's shaved my chest, ripped it open, chopped some stuff out, then sewn it all back together with a staple gun and covered the cut with a huge plaster. I put my chin on my chest to look down. It turns out this is exactly what has happened, so I pass out.
---
The first proper memory I have of waking up is weakly raising my head to touch my chest. They've shaved off all my manly hair, except for two pathetic-looking tufts around my nipples. Great. The skin is a ghastly yellow-orange colour, which I found out later was the iodine they'd used in surgery to steralise me.
Down the centre of my chest, from chin to the bottom of my rib cage, is a huge white plaster. I'm astonished, I thought it would be a bandage wrapped round my whole torso, or a big stitched-up hole. It hurts.
There's a tube coming out of my stomach, through a small hole, and running down out of sight towards the floor. In the back of my left hand there's a syringe attached to a thing on a stand. Another drip-type thing goes into a hole in my left wrist. Shit, loads of tubes and holes everywhere.
None of this is what I was expecting.
Now there are nurses standing around. Is it five minutes later or five hours? I have no idea. A nurse asks, "Are you in any pain Giles?".
I say yes, or nod my head. She places what felt like a TV remote control in my hand. "You can press this button to give yourself more morphine if you want," she said. Wow.
The remote control was connected to a stand with an automatic injection system mounted on it, all very high tech. This was the thing running into my left wrist. I pressed the button several times in the next few hours, dosing myself up with morphine and steadily losing all awareness of pain, time, everything really. I was completely off my head.
At some point the food trolley came round. I was sitting up in bed. I was hungry, bizarrely, and asked for whatever they could provide. They gave me a plate of hot macaroni cheese with mashed potato. The pasta was awful, the richness of the cheese made me want to vomit. I decided to stick with the potato.
The effort of getting my fork up to my mouth sent me to sleep. Then I woke up with the fork and mash hanging off my lips. I manfully struggled to finish that mouthful, went back for another, and repeated the whole process - forkful of food, up to mouth, pass out, wake up, chew, swallow, and again.
This could have gone on for hours for all I know. Eventually the nurse took the plate away.
Later on Kate arrived. I was still very sleepy for a while, and still had iodine all over my chest from the op, which a nurse scrubbed off for me eventually. Suddenly I perked up, began chatting to Kate, and demanded five lemon puff biscuits from her. I had a sudden need for sugar and scoffed the lot, plus half a banana, very fast.
Then I fell asleep again. Kate stayed with me while I slept for two hours, stroking my arm. Bliss. I vaguely remember her kissing me goodbye and going home.
Things are pretty hazy after that. Later on, I puked up the mashed potato, the lemon puff biscuits and the half a banana.
Tuesday morning I had one of the tubes, a drain, removed from my stomach. It had been there to carry away blood and pus and other horrible gunky things that had been dribbling from the wound. The tube was extremely uncomfortable and I was very pleased to get rid of it.
By now I was able to move about a bit, and went to the bathroom and managed to take a shower and have a shave, but after that I was exhausted.
In the morning I told the nurses I didn't want any more morphine, since it was just making me feel sick. They did carry on giving me codine and paracetamol pills, and the anti-inflammatory drug Voltrol.
My dad came to visit that afternoon and while he was there, a nurse arrived to tell me I had been cleared for a transfer to a private ward - Nuffield House. They needed my bed for another surgery patient, there were spare beds at Nuffield, and I was the youngest (fittest) person in Dorcas ward - so I got the bed.
Bizarre. I had never even considered getting a private bed, especially one I didn't have to pay for. But despite my socialist leanings, I wasn't going to argue. Gimme the bed, I said.
So they had to get me there. For a normal, fit adult, it would be about five minutes walk. But the hospital decided to get me a minicab to take me there - and what a nightmare trip that turned out to be.
Picture the scene: my family, standing round me in Dorcas Ward, gather up my various belongings and bags and carry them off to the Nuffield. A porter arrives with a wheelchair to take me away to my cab. Everybody's happy. Kate and I go down to the main entrance of the hospital to meet the cab driver, with the porter pushing me through the smooth-floored corridors of the building. So far, so good.
The hospital door is automatic, and slides open. Then there are cobbles.
Kate has to push my chair (I can't remember where the porter was by now) across the cobbles, and it judders like mad.
PAIN.
Ah fuck, I say under my breath, and Kate begins to panic. I don't blame her, looking back on it.
We reach the far end of the cobbles after what seems like ages and I sit there, blinking in the bright sunlight, as the cab driver opens the doors and pushes me up to the side of the car. I climb in slowly, and we drive off. Out of one of the hospital gates, down the main road for a hundred metres, then back into the hospital another way. Blink and you miss it - we're there, outside the Nuffield.
The cab driver offered to get me a wheelchair, but I said, no, don't worry, I'll walk it. We were parked right outside the front door, and it didn't look far.
So I slowly staggered into the Nuffield reception, pyjama top undone and flapping in the breeze, slippers going flip-flop-flip on the carpet.
My dad is sitting in the reception area with my other family and my friend Caroline. When he sees me walk in he does his nut.
"Did you have to walk here?" he yells.
"No dad, calm down-"
"I can't believe they sent you here in a cab. It's outrageous." He marches up to the receptionist. "This young man has just had open chest surgery and ...." Yadda yadda yadda. I switched off at this point, too exhausted to join in any further and just wanting to sit down, which I did.
Nuffield was a whole new world. My own room, with TV, phone, excellent food and individual nursing care. Amazing. I had no idea what private medicine was all about until I got this "free sample".
Clean, fresh bed sheets. Wonderful food, and masses of it, much more than anyone coming out of a general anaesthetic could expect to eat. Gallons of tea.
On Wednesday I was given lots of painkillers - the morphine had finally got out of my system and I was now in quite a lot of pain. Bad move.
People came to visit during the day, which was great. My brother came over and sat on the edge of the bed, while we watched a test match on the TV.
Things were less hazy by this time, and during the day I was able to go for little walks up and down the corridor (which was exhausting) and go to the bathroom and wash myself without help.
Amazingly, on Wednesday morning after breakfast, I got up and had a shower on my own. I remember gingerly stepping into the bath and taking ages to do the simplest thing, like wash under my arms.
Washing the cut was the strangest thing. It was not exactly painful, but scrubbing it with shower gel somehow felt very strange. My hairless chest was tender to the touch.
That night as I tried to sleep, I started hallucinating and hearing things. I felt sick, had no appetite, and was dizzy without even moving. It took me a long time to get to sleep because I saw bizarre visions every time I shut my eyes. The Verve were right: the drugs don't work.
On Thursday, when the doctors came round on their morning check-ups, they were talking about sending me home, that day perhaps. Blimey, I thought. How the hell will I get home?
But then they caught sight of my PalmPilot and all gathered round while I showed them the nifty things it could do, which made me chuckle. I reckon 3Com might have made some money out of some of them, thanks to me.
Coming off some of the pain killers really helped. I was awake more and could think straight. Having said that, my memory was still screwed up and there are loads of gaps in this story as a result.
On Friday my brother and Kate came to fetch me from hospital. I couldn't wear a seatbelt because of the cut in my chest, so I sat in the back and my brother drove very carefully.
Even the simple process of driving a few miles through town was exhausting. We got home exhausted, and I was so pleased that Kate took the next week off work to nurse me and look after me.
After I had spent a few weeks at home, things started to settle down into a kind of routine.
Each morning I would lie in to about 9 or 9.30am, kissing Kate goodbye when she left for work at 8 or 8.30.
During the morning I would have breakfast, do some washing up, and walk (very slowly) to the paper shop to buy at least one (often several) daily papers, which I would read back home with a cup of tea.
Sometime during the day I would go online to check my e-mail and do a bit of surfing. It was very difficult to tear myself away from the Internet, even for a short time, which is a bit of a sad thing to admit really.
Over time my scar healed over. It went through stages - in the weeks immediately following the op, it was a bright red line, that looked like someone had drawn on me with a felt tip pen.
Later, a horrible scab started forming, which became particularly big and ugly at the top of the cut. I couldn't cover it up with shirts because it felt sore, so I exposed it to the open air and felt decidedly silly when I went out.
There was a short spell when the weather was gorgeous, so on those days I tried to sit outside when reading my daily newspaper. But I could not do a lot of this as I found my scar started to hurt if exposed to strong sunlight for a while - the delicate new skin couldn't cope with the ultraviolet light.
The scab fell off slowly - it took weeks for it all to go. What remained was a much fatter line, about a centimetre across. My chest hairs grew back fast too, leaving a thin straggly bald patch running down the middle of my chest.
When I first came home, everything was difficult, right down to boiling the kettle and climbing the stairs. I couldn't sleep properly because I couldn't turn on to my sides, I had to stay on my back all night. As time went on, and my strength returned, I was able to do more and more.
I spent most of my time sitting and reading, or sleeping. I often had a snooze in the afternoon or early evening, but it depended on how many drugs I might have taken that day. While on the codine, the pain was fine, but I was constipated as a result. Mmm, nice.
After about ten days I stopped taking pain killers, and stopped being a zombie. I began to move around the house more, and go for more and longer walks. Over time things improved until I found myself able to catch a bus or even drive with no problems.
About eight weeks after the operation, I was able to move around the house with no difficulty at all. I caled work and suggested I return to my job. When I did, it seemed like nothing had changed, like I had been away for a day, not two months.
I still get twinges, odd sensations inside my chest, when I am lying in bed or swimming. But these are the exception. Mostly I am as fit and well as I ever was, and can safely say I have never valued life as much as I do now.
Going through the experience taught me a lot, and made me take a closer look at how I live my life. Minor changes were easy to make (watch less TV, make more of an effort to keep in touch with friends and family) but long-term changes are still on the horizon. The op is long since past, but I am still feeling the effects.
In short, a harmless tumour, medically known as a teratoma. It was probably growing inside me from a very young age. A medical friend tells me the lungs are quite squashy, so it probably made room for itself by nestling up against them.
It could not have been dangerous, unless it grew bigger and threatened the viability of another major organ. I'm glad, after everything, that they took it out.
One thing that really hit home - it sounds like a cliche - is how precious time is. I came to the conclusion there is more to be had out of life, if you make the time to achieve it.
So as a result I make a conscious effort now to make the best use of my time. I don't spend so much of it playing videogames or watching TV.
In a funny kind of way, I'm almost glad I had this little adventure. It's made me grow up that little bit more, and appriciate some things that previously I took for granted. But that's not say I'd like to go through all of that again.