8. Peach Iced Tea

I was thirsty. The first two weeks of not drinking water were excruciating. I was having bizarre fantasies about peach iced tea. When a speech therapist first introduced us to a letter board the first thing I spelt out began with 'th' and she said "Is it 'thanks?'" and I confirmed this as I wanted to be polite, but then I followed this up what I really wanted to say, which was 'thirsty'. My parents told the nurse and they assured me I was getting enough water through my nose tube (NG), but I was a little concerned, were they giving me enough? How were they supposed to know I drink lots?  (This speech therapist also massaged my cheeks by putting her fingers in my mouth and my parents were very excited by my first shrug when they asked me how it was.)

Three weeks in, on the 8th October, I had a food tube (PEG) put directly into my stomach. I woke up after the general anaesthetic with nothing in my nose, thank goodness, and a thin two-finger length tube coming out my tummy. (I loved general anaesthetic; it was the best way to pass the time). The stomach tube wasn't sore so I couldn't feel or see it, I just believed that it was there. I was glad the tube in my nose was gone. I never saw it, or felt it, but I was uncomfortably aware when a nurse fiddled with the string that went up one nostril and out the other to hold the tube in place. Something must have gone wrong with it because a few days before the PEG tube, the nurse had been fiddling with it loads, and before I knew it, a doctor was coming to replace the NG, which felt awful. I know you're supposed to swallow these tubes to make them go down quicker but I couldn't swallow. Putting it in felt how you would imagine it. Grim. Afterwards, I felt something fleshy hanging around in my mouth, and batted it around in my mouth with my tongue. I don't know what this was, but at some point I must have swallowed it.

Luckily, I lost my sense of smell for about 4 weeks, and with it my sense of taste. This meant I was oblivious of the horrible taste of my mouth. (That joy came later). Every night in that hospital, someone would brush my teeth, squirt water in with a syringe, and clean out the whole thing with a sucky-air tube (saliva-ejector). I lost count of the number of times someone said "It's like going to the dentist!" Why, I thought a lot of sarcastic things, let me tell you. I found this procedure such a waste of time, nothing had been in my mouth so why clean it?!

I was a lot more aware of what was going on the third week. (Except one story my family tells me which I don't recall, where a doctor came up to me and started speaking to me excessively loudly. They pointed out that I never had a problem with my hearing. They said he was asking me very basic questions and I just wasn't responding. I claim this must have been because I wasn't, in fact, awake.) I had bad double-vision. It meant my eyes were out of sync. The left eye was worse than the right, but both were playing up, bouncing up and down in a very distracting way, not putting their images together properly resulting in a doubling effect. This meant I was given an eye patch to swap to each eye in turn. I didn't like this because it blinkered me, and I couldn't swap it over when I wanted to. Of course, I got all the pirate comments - how come there are no other popular associations for eye patches?!

One morning, a nurse put a laxative pill up my bum. I couldn't make facial expressions but inside my eyebrows were raised. Oh no. Later on, Asli and Hana came to visit me. Imagine my horror when I suddenly did a big poo under my sheet. There was me, in my pirate eye-patch, completely unable to express what just happened and unable to smell if it was obvious. All I could do was howl with laughter on the inside. Thankfully, they didn't notice.

My family's literature degree.