The Curate's Egg

The last 10 days, since 8th Sep, have been a mixed bag, like the curate's egg ... good in parts!

I had the op on my right knee at about 9am on the 8th and it went very well. Came to again about 11am. They'd put an extra shot of juice down the right leg so I had no pain on waking which was very good. The worst thing about hospital is the bed-pans! I don't know what brain donor designed them but they are excruciatingly painful as well as being scary ... you might tip up! they do nothing to encvourage you to drink or get your bowels moving again, both of which are viatl parts of healing.

That said the care was pretty good, only a couple of half-baked martinets attempting to bully me ... needless to say, they lost! the food however is atrocious. Cheap, cheap, cheap, not organic, badly cooked, tastless. Well no, even that's wrong! It mostly looks ad tastes as though it had been scrounged from the compost bin about 3 days back! Don't the admin powers realise that good food speeds healing? Stupid question, sorry, of course they don't.

Then there was the discovery that there are 9 managers supposedly looking after the ward I was on. There are only about 30 beds in the ward, for goodness sake! All the managers are earning at least twice what the nursing staff get for doing bugger all except clog the system. What a terminal waste of money. Could have been spent on more nusres, better food, a good chef who knows how to cook well within the budget, etc, etc.

Then there's the stupid practice the hopsital admin do ... they don't have enough nurses so, for the first half of the financial year, they hire in angency staff at twice the cost of NHS nurses. Then, come Sep, they realise the budget's shrunk a lot so they stop hiring agency staff anf there's a shortage of staff throughout the hospital. Can anyone tell me why brain-donors are the only one's who get these management jobs ??? Tick-box degrees and no joined-up thinking.

But the knee itself is great. the pain (toady) is NOT great, in fact it's bloody awful! I would cheerfully swallow a gallon of morphine but no chance of that. I'm just off to my first external physio in a minute, will report back. Physio, so far, is excellent if painfull. Am stuffed to the gills with codeine ... *g*