Not great…..not terrible

I. Thoroughly rucked

2.Has it all gone horribly wrong ?

3Now what

…….”not great – not terrible” for those who don’t recognize it is what the nuclear engineer (Dyatlov) comes out with when first given the apparent radiation level at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant just after the whole thing has gone critical and blown the lid off of one of the main reactor vessels – most of the contents of the reactor are now lying around outside or on the roof and several of the crew are already dead or dying from radiation sickness.

Unfortunately it’s also what I said in the emergency department when one of the duty doctors asked me how I was doing….might have even been the duty consultant who was obviously too tired or too ‘meh‘ to appreciate the cultural reference and implied joke. The other possible explanation is that the duty consultant might have been the kind of doctor who has heard every bit of crap that patients come out with and maybe I missed the internal rolleyes he responded with – honestly I was too tired to notice.

Day one – thoroughly rucking rucked !

Just for a moment, rounding up my previous exercise series……walk/exercise sessions 81 to 84 i did in a single day as I was experimenting with using rucking as a harder form of combined exercise as a significant step up from what I had been doing since January and a horrible chest infection. For the record then walk no 81 was on a steep path up through local woodland carrying an old rucksack loaded with about 25 pounds of green firewood, It wasn’t greatly successful because I couldn’t really get the pace up to get my heart rate sufficiently high to get anywhere near where I would eventually want to be for an 80% VO2 max. Walk/ruck no 82 was a bit more successful in that I moved to one of my usual exercise hills, shortened my stride length and picked up my cadence quite a bit….it had a better result but wasn’t great so for the last session of the day (exercise session no 84) I tried a different stride length and pace combination (longer stride length and determined fast march kind of pace) which pushed me a lot nearer to what I needed.

Walk no 85 was the complete disaster day…..having done 3 relatively hard sessions the day before I chose to do a longer walk at an easier pace and no load….basically just a ‘walk in the woods’ and it was during that walk that whatever event happened actually did so and I went from fairly normal walking to staggering around as though drunk and with very little balance. When asked by my GP what had happened I described it as ‘tacking’ up Cowes high street after a post race drinking session – not quite right as I’m not a drinker.

It took me more than an hour to get home and even then I wasn’t sure I was going to get home in one piece without help – that was when I texted my partner with the message that I thought something had gone horribly wrong. An hour later I was at our local GP surgery being assessed by one of the duty GP’s and he was pretty confident that i’d had a stroke and really needed to go to the local hospital which is about 20 miles away.

Several things happened then in short order although I’m a bit vague now about what happened in what order. Within the first half hour I had been checked in, been seen by the triage nurse, had bloods taken and acquired a cannula and been whisked in and out of the CT scanner…so far so good but it’s at that stage that everything slowed down big time and I think it was another 10 or 12 hours before I was seen by a clinician (Consultant). At one point I remarked to my partner that the whole department felt like a zoo….and that was not long before one of the angrier animals kicked off while being seen in one of the consultation rooms : suddenly there was a lot of shouting, swearing and stuff obviously being thrown around before the animal escaped – I don’t know quite what the story was except perhaps it was drug seeking behaviour.

Whatever…..what ever it was my mental state seemed to be bouncing up and down like a Plymouth slapper’s skirt one moment trying (and failing) to be a bit amusing and the next almost crying.

Later on in my stay I think my own language was somewhat inappropriate when I was being seen by the stroke consultant and when I was assessed by the OT I answered her question about how I was feeling with the much more honest answer of feeling extremely tired and emotionally labile

Truly terrible.

Well, it’s now tomorrow already, iv’e had a much better sleep and I guess that soon it will be yesterday i that I have to move on mentally from where I am at just now. Having a quiet day yesterday was great except that I was still trying to place events in the right order and every time I took a break I kept going back to a few things that will stick with me for a long time because they already come with the emotional state, good or bad, that they first happened with. Having described my own state as ‘not great-terrible’ (right now I can’t think of a more apposite cultural reference except perhaps ‘there’s someone in my head but it’s not me’) I feel that I have to kick myself a bit, stop feeling dischuffed about the whole experience and simply move on a step.

To be honest my situation isn’t that bad, certainly not when I compare it against the state of most of the blokes I shared a bay with : I was quite clearly the most mobile and fittest bloke out of the 5 of us sharing the same space. I’m tempted just to go and visit a couple of them that I got on well with ; one that I sat talking to in the dark hours did say to me that it was good just to have a chat – and I agree.

The one that sticks with me though is the state of the oldest and most damaged patient in that bay for whom I think there is nothing in his future except ongoing pain and a miserable and lonely death – I actually hope that it comes sooner rather than later but that’s just my judgement as an ex nurse. His situation is that he has had such a severe stroke that he has almost no movement except with his face, he is contracted up into the classic stroke shape, is aphasic (can’t speak) but can make sound – he cries out every half an hour or so because using other methods of pain assessment he appears to be in pain or distress most of the time. At times I thought he was trying to communicate with me just using eye movement and because I was fully mobile I went to find one of the staff to speak with about him – aside from regular pain relief I honestly think that there’s not much anyone can do.

There’s not much else I think I can or should say and I think that one of the best things I can do now is shut up, move on and concentrate on my own future.

Stay well Y’all.