Am I A Fraudulent Raisin?

I’m pretty sure I no longer need to be in the ICU. Everybody around me is coming and going and yet my bed space stays filled and I am unecessarily present in it. Today they have given up trying to stabilise me enough to move to a ward, yet I continue to get comments on how much better I look compared even to yesterday. I am weak and I sleep a lot, but I just feel this level of fuss is highly ridiculous. I feel fine. I feel frustrated at my body for not being as great as it currently feels. All of me is puffy but if I were able to move around I’m sure this issue would ease. They won’t let me stand or walk or go for a ride off the ward in a wheelchair. They won’t disconnect me from anything and I am at the stage of wellness where I feel absolutely awful for taking up so much time and effort.

My main focus shifted to finding a way to adequately thank awesome nurse and this team in general. I have genuinely never encountered a nicer, more understanding group of hospital staff. They have explained everything to me and included me in my care every step of the way. They more than listened – they accepted. They understood. They wanted to try. The consultants have been lovely and they all wear smiles and it has gone a long way in keeping me calmer than I usually would be. The nurses aren’t nurses, they are the nicest group of people I’ve ever met and they just happen to wear scrubs and spend their days maintaining life and spreading smiles. So I sent my friends to grab thank you cards when they went shopping – one for everyone, and one just for awesome nurse who I genuinely think has no idea how amazing she is and had such a huge impact on me that the least I can do is try to tell her. 

Last night, each time awesome nurse checked my blood or anything she woke me up beforehand in case I freaked out in my sleep. I appreciated this a lot. I had one nightmare but couldn’t scream. I woke up to find myself bleating like a lamb with awesome nurse leaning close to me and just talking softly. She woke me up this morning at the end of her shift to say goodbye, and I was genuinely gutted that she couldn’t just work an infinite hour shift.

My fellow third wheel has invested in a speaker so we can put it on my bed and listen to music (ICU rave!). He’s grabbed a couple of cards for me – I wanted the one for awesome nurse to be funny because I felt that was more her style. He also says he has grabbed me some drinks and snacks. My stomach is extremely grateful for this. My appetite isn’t back yet, which is very unlike me, and also concerning as I usually consume 6,000- 9,000 calories a day (I am eternally and un-satisfying hungry no matter how much I eat because of a health problem) and due to medical issues still lose weight. The nurses really are a fan of my fellow third wheel. They keep commenting to each other and me about how sweet he is and how much they love him… They also keep trying to persuade me that we should be an item, but he’d never go there and I could never burden anyone with… Myself. Weirdly enough, I have been craving the companionship a relationship offers recently, but I fear I am a raisin:

“This is a serious question; how do you get a boy to like you when there’s always someone better? Like why would anyone ever pick a raisin out of a bowl of chocolate chips? This is literally my biggest concern in life I am a raisin.” – An unknown person who totally gets it.

I fear that because of my health I will never find love, and recently I just really want to hold and be held, to snuggle and be snuggled, to try to love a human and be loved in return. I have plenty of love to give but I am too scared to give it to anyone. I fear the right person will never appear. I can’t help but think this over and over. But I am lucky enough to have the best friends I could ever ask for. I will end up old and alone with a bunch of dogs.

I’m currently sat in a big chair wrapped in a million and one blankets (this is a slight exaggeration, take away 99,999 blankets and you arrive at the total I am buried under. 2. There are 2). Today’s nurse helped me into the chair and I managed to have a wash there instead of in my bed. I also got to eat my lunch here, which means I no longer eat and sleep and wash and pee (not literally, there is a catheter) all in the same place like a goldfish trapped in a bowl. She’s pushed the bed right back out of the way and dragged the chair with me in it right into the middle of the cubicle. I feel so much more human.

“You were really quite poorly when you came in, do you know that?” A random nurse says to me, emphasising her words in a way that tells me she doesn’t think I appreciate just how unwell I was. Surely I can’t have been that bad though? Or I’d be more of a mess now… Apart from the whole time delay with my vision, my weakness, and the puffiness, I’m basically unscathed by the entire experience (miraculously). But it has shaken me a lot. This was the time I almost lost. The time I should have lost. That hasn’t hit home yet. I thought I’d come close before, and I’ve been more unwell in ICU before, but this admission was nasty. This time they thought they were going to lose me before they even had IV access, the level of panic was scary, the things they were saying were scary. In a few months, I will probably start having flashbacks to being on that trolley with Dr Holler running alongside it telling people I don’t have time. I already kee reliving it in my mind. My brain fixates on the patches it remembers.

“I’d have put an I.O straight into you in A&E in that state.” Awesome nurse said last night. Part of me wishes they had, then maybe I wouldn’t be stuck here right now. If they’d listened to me straight away instead of faffing around and leaving me five hours with no IV access (because every person that took a stab at me thought they were amazing enough to get a needle into a venous system that had collapsed and refused to admit that this was an impossible task until I was almost dead), I wouldn’t have been at the point where they thought they were losing me. I can’t be angry, and I can’t complain – they saved my life in the end, everybody makes mistakes. I am eternally grateful just like the aliens from Toy Story.

The lovebirds just popped up to visit for their usual twenty minutes (so they don’t have to pay for parking) and my fellow third wheel waited in the cafe because (despite being allowed to break the rules and have three visitors yesterday) there is a very strict two visitor policy which is enforced by a lovely yet terrifying ward sister. My fellow third wheel is going back with them to clear up the caravan, then they are going back to Kent and he is being dropped off here with me. We’re messaging quite a lot so he’s here in spirit anyway.

Seriously though, I feel a million times better than I have in months. And I’m trapped in an intensive care unit despite this fact. People here are intubated and ventilated and I can breathe. I can now talk. And yet they’ve stopped even talking about moving me to a ward. I feel like a fraud. I’m scared about possibly going to London, but yesterday I was too unwell/ unstable to transport, so by the time the doctors who said they could manage everything got a specialist consultant involved and realised London was probably a smart idea, I couldn’t be transferred. I’m hoping tomorrow everything will have resolved itself somehow. I don’t want to be on a ward where I can hear doctors at the desk in front of my bed talking about who they expect to die in the next 24 hours and how pointless it is to intervene with some people. 

I’m alone, and so for now I will blog and watch and wait and hope.

OMG MY FELLOW THIRD WHEEL JUST SHOWED UP UNEXPECTEDLY THIS IS THE BEST SURPRISE EVER BYE!!