Call this Convalescence?

One good thing about the room I'd been transferred to last week is that wake-up time is at a more reasonable hour, so it was 8.00 am when I heard my name being mentioned during the changeover of the nursing shifts. Sure enough, I was told that a bed was available for me and that I'd be going this morning to a place called Gracefield. Ths actually turned out to be the name of the ward I was transferred to in what has recently been re-named the Incorporated Orthopaedic Hospital of Ireland, which is in Clontarf, very close to where I live. A taxi was laid on to bring me and an 85-year-old woman over there, escorted by one of the Mater orderlies, and I was there by 11.30, just in time for lunch.

The place is fine, though it's still a bit of a building site. The facilities are good, and the it's all nice and bright and airy -- but there's no way it's a convalescence place. It's geared essentially towards rehabiltation for mostly elderly patients with broken hips or hip replacements. I felt like a fish out of water the minute I was shown to my bed and I was introduced to my five ward mates on an instant first-name basis by a nurse with an over-the-top jolly-jolly, talk-down-to-the-patients tone of voice. The patients, too, were much, much older than me, all apparently suffering from hearing loss as well as their limb problems, and all indulging in a non-stop cross-room interchange of chatter about the most trivial and uninteresting topics imaginable. All in all, I felt that I'd been dumped into a corner f an old fashioned pub in among a group of old codgers who'd been drinking in the same corner fro the past fifty years.

I knew at once this place wasn't going to be for me, and I spent a good while mulling over my options. My discomfort was worsened during the night, when I only got three hours sleep despite having asked for a sleeping tablet because of being in strange surroundings. Visits during the afternoon and evening from my great friends Derek and Rita and two of my cousins helped maintain my sanity to a certain extent, but I was not at all a happy person, and couldn't help feeling that I'd been sent to an utterly inappropriate facility.

The blip is thanks to special guest blipper Derek. he and Rita and I spent a pleasant while sitting and chatting in the smokers' gazebo out behind the new part of the hospital. I liked the resemblance between this growth of icy and the look of my leg from which the vein had been taken to do the needful for the bypass. I handed the camera to Derek, and he took the shot. Thanks, Derek.