Days like this

Kate Anderson

I knew the day wasn't going to be great when I woke up in a room full of screeching toddlers, desperate to go to the toilet, wearing a somewhat questionable nightie - the colour of which can only really be described as "Hospital blue". Needless to say, at the tender age of fifteen I was not overtly enthralled at being turfed into the children's ward. I did however thoroughly enjoy being the most intelligent and wise of the patients - I would become their queen and we would rule the world!

Okay so you may be wondering how I ever became self-appointed queen of the children's ward. Well it starts a little something like this: the day before, we had moved our stuff into our new temporary home: house number eight. During this time I had been complaining of an excruciating pain in my side, which obviously my parents ignored convinced that I was just trying to get out of the mammoth task that is unpacking. I was not. Later on that day after I had fallen down the stairs in pain, been refused an appointment at the local doctor's surgery and been rushed to the nearest hospital on an offensive country road by a kind gentleman called Colin. I was to be cut open immediately. Fantastic. Apparently that irritating organ called an appendix, which by the by hadn't really had much of an impact on my life so far, decided that he was going to burst and have his fifteen minutes of fame. He was to be escorted out of my anatomy. Unfortunately I was not allowed to keep him in a jar on my windowsill and was an "odd little girt for even asking".

So back to my ward. I was planning on pretending to be asleep for a few moments more when a throbbing pain in my left hand prevented me from doing so. I glared down at the hand, with the intention of finding the cause of said pain, only to discover that it was not my hand at all. Well it was my hand but didn't look the same as I remembered it - it had ballooned up to four times its normal size and uncannily resembled the result of blowing into a latex glove. I let out a small yelp and with my skinny hand furiously pressed the appropriately named "panic button". A nurse then meandered in looking slightly confused, I must say this response was not really what I had in mind; I would have liked slow motion running, screaming ladies and the whole room to be coloured sepia but I guess that's just in the movies. She marched on over to me as I tried to lift my fat hand to show her. Her eyes widened and in the most unglamorous yet oddly comforting west-country accent she said: "Oh dear, what 'appened to yer 'and then love?"

She then proceeded to squeeze the hand and explain to me that the trainee nurse on call last night must have inserted my drip incorrectly causing all the fluid to reside in my skin. She also said that the swelling probably wouldn't go down for a few weeks but not to worry, and that she "'ent never seen wun as bad as that before". Joy.

So to recap: not only was I in agony from my surgery, I now, just to add insult to injury, had an enormous hand.

But the day does not end here my friend. Later on, when I was slurping on custard and watching Big Brother repeats, I saw two heads bob past my window - one of these heads was wearing a bald cap and the other was wigged with a blue afro. I watched as these heads floated past my ward into the next where I heard a lady scream. The heads then reversed apologetically. With a little shame but mostly pride I realised that the floating heads were in fact my friends. The heads spotted me in my magnificent attire and ran over to me hugging me and informing me of the fright the lady next door had suffered. We laughed and I scooted over enabling them to sit on the side of the bed. One of my friends had lied and said she was my sister to gain access into the hospital. In true sitcom style they didn't feel the need to justify their wigs and moustaches and I didn't ask, we simply carried on regardless. One of my friends handed me a half-eaten bunch of grapes with a sort of undeserved expression of self-accomplishment.

"It's grapes that sick people eat right?" she protested "Yeah, thanks..."

"You are welcome. So, you look nice."

I did not look nice. The pain in my stomach had somehow caused me to have an inability to eat like a human - which inevitably resulted in me being coated in the custard I was slurping before. I also hadn't showered in about three days and had a delicious smidgen of sick below my neck. I was living the high life.

They questioned me about the drip by my side and it was at this point that they noticed the hand.

"Good God. Is that your hand?"

"No" I thought I would try to freak my friends out a little and pretend that it wasn't my hand, although to be completely honest, in hindsight, the real story of my fat hand was freaky enough. I then came clean and told them everything that had happened that morning while they rolled about in sympathetic hysterics.

One of my friends then squeezed the drip to see if my hand would inflate anymore - a valid experiment obviously. After reaping a sufficient amount of havoc, my friends left in gay abandon putting a magazine right at the end of the bed where I couldn't reach. It was times like these that you really knew who your best friends were.

All in all the day had been one of tremendous excitement that I will never forget - at least not after this handy chance to document it. Although I was in pain from having my insides poked, prodded and removed I seemed to feel nothing but a Disney style warm fuzziness that day that made the whole experience not bad at all.