Ketchup Daze

A running joke I have with a friend of  mine who has CF is “ Stop squirting ketchup in your sputum cups to get attention!” which of course no one is. It`s a funny way to handle irritating moments like yesterday morning, when you wake up coughing up “ketchup“ from your lungs. Not the nice tasting kind. You should really call the hospital. It`s the best thing to do. Or you could just grab some breakfast and get on with the day. Because sometimes it “just happens”, as all who doctors, who know not what to say, at some time like to exhale, exasperated. It wasn’t really the case yesterday. Sensible or stupid - I could have been either. I could have waited to see if it chilled out and cycled to UCD as planned. Stupid would have been much easier, but that in itself would have, well, been stupid. So I called my team and an hour later I’m in one of the two examination rooms being told “Blood is black and white. It’s usually nothing big, just an indicator of infection.”. So technically I could go on home IV`s? “… But sometimes it’s about a blood vessel that starts up and won`t stop. It doesn’t matter if you`re standing on Nutley Lane and this happens. If you bleed and it doesn’t stop. You bleed and it doesn’t stop”. You see I knew that, deep down I knew that and I`m not a lunatic. But it`s not always the case.


I got a bed that evening. I was extremely lucky. It was a case of refusing to go to A and E, but the severity of the situation being so beyond me that I knew I was going to go to A and E, but had to fight obviously in the hope that I wouldn`t. A bed popped up because there are not a lot of people in at the moment, and maybe because I said I was already mentally planning to chronicle my time in A and E. I don`t care what it was, but I got a bed. If I can get a bed every other CF patient who needs immediate treatment and observation, as my consultant said I did, should get it immediately. After my first dose of IV`s I realised how yuck I actually felt. I was feeling that nauseous grumble of mucus in my chest. I fell asleep reading The Universal Journalist, dreaming about actually working for longer than 3 weeks. I did notice that half of the ward was closed though. They deployed the nurses to other areas and then had to reopen six of the 12 closed beds to alleviate the A and E. They then could not get the nurses back and hired agency to man the ward. Right.







You have a lot of time to think about these things hanging in a hospital bed. For lunch I ordered roast chicken, boiled potatoes and peas. I had been tempted to order the Chicken Cordon Bleu but I couldn’t’t be sure about it. Roast chicken was usually safe, not too tough. It strayed far from it’s predecessors and it’s accompaniment let it down further. Three hard boiled potatoes. It made me think of an episode of Wife Swap I watched recently, the only episode I`ve ever watched. Rhona Cameron was on searching desperately for organic food in a fry filled house with a less than charming, distant husband of another woman who saw the role of a wife as subservient. There`s a scene where she makes beans on toast and looks like she’s about to cry. After six weeks in here, three weeks out and now being unexpectedly lassoed back in, that’s how I felt.



Mountains of peas, carrot trees and rivers of gravy flash through my mind waiting for dinner. I ordered something safe. It will be good. Then the spuds are so hard the knife gets stuck in each of them, the peas are dry and the chicken’s exterior is hard and rough, the inside not much better. That’s where the ketchup comes in. Can I please have some milk and ketchup?, I ask the giggling kitchen lady. Giggling because she brought me in a delicious looking roast beef, turnip and mash potato a few minutes previously, that I had to refuse. Alas it was someone else`s grub and I was holding out for my super chicken, smooth and tender. This sent her into fits of giggles - Maybe she knew something I didn`t? Ketchup. I was still waiting twenty minutes later as my food grew colder. In fairness it`s standard routine here to deliver all condiments after the meal has been eaten. I shouldn`t really have expected anything different.

So I ate the dry hard potatoes and picked the purple bits out of the chicken and watched the kitchen lady, roughly my age, stroll past my door towards the kitchen with tea and then back towards the ward door, her purse tucked under her arm. Potatoes - so easy to cook. I eventually asked a nurse for both. She brought milk but she didn`t know where the ketchup was. I got it at 1.15, 45 minutes after I got my dinner. Yum.



It may seem like an example of mild neurosis that I`m writing this here. But it’s just a small example of how disconnected different parts of the system are. One of the most important things I can do in here, apart from take all my meds, is fight my infection with calories. I loose thousands of them each time I have an infection, just breathing and coughing. Food is so important, and antibiotics sometimes destroy my appetite, as with a lot of people with CF. So I`m not hungry, but I know food will help my recovery which gives me the drive to eat what`s in front of me. I know I need more than what`s in front of me to fight the infection. Good food would be nice.



Given the fact that I have enough energy to be bored, but not quite enough to continuously read, I`ll probably update this most days. With thoughts, musings and what ever else pops up.

Peace out!