Saturday, October 9, 2004

Chicken Soup?

I always wondered what it was about chicken soup in particular that was meant to cure illnesses. Perhaps it was just the fact that warm soup really warms your insides completely, or something. Anyway, I am ill. My throat is incredibly swollen and feels like it gets ripped to sheds whenever I breathe, which isn't particularly nice. And my ears/nose feel blocked up too. That's the worst thing about it, really: I hate not being able to breathe through my nose. The rest of my body's fine, it's all centered around my head. I could put up with a bad leg, but head-colds realy piss me off. The only saving grace about it is that it's made my voice wonderfully deep and mysterious ^__^ I like having that early morning gravely effect that adds so much depth to it. Granted, I'd raher not have a huge pain in my neck, but it's quite fun while it lasts, heh. Ailments I've never had to go to hospital for an actual illness before: it's always been for some other physical thing, like a broken leg/arm/toe/finger or a cyst elsewhere. This sounds stupid, but if I had to choose I'd rather break a bone than contract a serious illness, because illnesses can almost completely dehabilitate you and they aren't as easy to diagnose, treat and recover from necessarily. I'd have to say... I have a fear of illnesses. Serious ones, anyway. But even if it's something mild I always get feelings approaching those of 'What if it's fatal?'. For the types of illness I usually get it's silly to think things like that, but with all the media going on about these superviruses and the West Nile Virus, meningitis, you can't help but feel pressured into believing you have something serious. The worst thing I have had was when I was off school for three weeks in year five because of something nasty. There's been the odd case of vomity things, but nothing as prolonged. The longest time I've had to stay in a hospital was... two weeks, I think, when I first broke my leg. I stayed in St Richard's in Chichester while they settled me down, and then I had to go to a specialist hospital near London so that my bones could be repaired and put into a proper plaster cast for ten more weeks. The children's ward at St Richard's was much nicer than the one at Stanmore Orthapaedic. The walls were nicely coloured, it was all nice and bright and you had lovely patterned curtains to pull round you while the doctors were examining you or you had to use a bedpan (which is one of the most undignified things in the world, by the way). I even had people come and play with me from time to time ^_^ And if you were lucky, you could move into one of the computer game rooms and play on... somehting obscure- it must have been an Atari, because the only games I remember being able to play was either this 1942-esque shooter, a maths thing or something to do with a guy who could create little rainbows for you to walk on. From what I remember, it was fun. The choices of videos weren't amazing, but I don't suppose many hospitals have much to go by. They might have N64s now... Mirrors Stanmore was a lot older, as you could tell from the course tiled carpet and peeling paint. With its faded paintings of Winnie the Pooh on the windows it still had its charms, but overall it felt a lot more like the 1940s. The bed weren't in one long corridor- they were in blocks of six or so, and there'd be a few more lining the walls. Off to one side was the babies ward, and fairly often you'd hear one of them crying. Some of the things you saw were quite harrowing at times. Since the hospital dealt specifically with bone conditions, you saw a lot of really young scoliosis patients- kids with huge metal frames drilled into their heads in order to try and straighten their spines, and other people drilled into other huge contraptions in order to keep whatever limb was broken from moving around too much. I never went into the babies' ward, but at night you could hear them. Mum told me that some of them were attached to frames almost like being on the rack, with weights at one end to balance them out and try and slowly work the spine into a normal growing position. It sounds like something out of a horror movie, but as far as I'm aware it's one of the few things that can be done. Stanmore wasn't anywhere as good for games. Old crap toys and a SNES were all they had, I think. When I came back a few years later for a check-up they'd acquired a PlayStation, but I didn't stay long enough to be able to play on it. My most recent hospital trip was to St Richard's, about four years ago. I was in a different ward to the children, but somewhere nearby. Certainly had the same video choices as they did, heh. I was on my own in a room with three other beds. Must've been a quiet week or something. I had a view out of the window across some sort of forecourt, though, and it was quite nice to see into the streets of Chichester every so often. This was during my last week of GCSE's. I had developed a silas just below my spine which had burst and needed operating on. I don't mind going into hospital that much- I tend to associate it with fairly fun memories, despite the feelings of pain that would come with or after it. I guess I just like being anaesthetised, heh ^_^; It's quite a surreal feeling, though. Feeling ill at any time isn't exactly normal, but when you're on your own too... you can't move anywhere and all you have to do is either what you ask the nurses for or what you brought with you. I was intending to write some Beast Wars fanfics but just didn't bother in the end: the story was too complicated to try and work out, heh. I came out of that all right, despite having to have plasters applied and removed almost every night for four months afterwards. I guess it's been pretty eventful- thankfully I've not had any head injuries, unlik my sister, who's managed to have three, and scared me to death each and every time >.> They were only superficial, so she's okay. I don't man to suggest that I find going to hospital fun, but at least I know I should be healed (or on the way to being healed) when I come out. We're lucky in that we have a really decent hospital in the area, so if you do need to go anywhere, it's to somewhere nice. It makes things that much more bearable, heh. I don't think other people always see it like that, though. Oh, I could go on forever about people who sue the National Health Service for mistakes during operations, but I won't. I need to reserve my topics carefully, heh.

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