Helen is back...but for how long ?

Just got back from the hospital, fortunately, accompanied by Helen who has been "suspended" from the ward rather than discharged. She has not had a good day. They persuaded her to stay in hospital last night on the basis that they needed to monitor her condition every 4 hours and watch her like a hawk in case she showed any signs of enjoying herself or getting better in which case they could come in and find some new way to make her miserable and unwell. They also promised to undertake a VK X-ray today. Not sure what VK stands for (Very Killing ?) but it seems to inolve them injecting some sort of dye into Helen and then watching it move around her body.

Anyway, they failed to check on Helen at all in the night - she should have pretended to be dead on the floor this morning - that's undoubtedly what I would have done. That would learn 'em. Then the doctor failed to come to see her until late this afternoon so that she had to miss Molly's appointment on the ward downstairs and then he had the temerity to try to tell her that she had to stay another night so that they could get their act together and do the Virtually Knackered, Violent Karma, Vitals Kicking (or whatever) X-ray. That was the point at which the plot and Helen ceased to be contiguous, and instead a state of contiguity was reached between the faeces and the rotating air-cooling device. The language that Helen apparently used to describe what she thought of the way in which she had been treated was, shall we say, richly colourful. The result was that the doctor went away to lick his wounds for a while and concluded that having her on the ward all night on his case was not in either his or her best interests. Typically, in order to avoid a bureaucratic nightmare of Hieronymous Boschian proportions he came up with the cunning plan that if he stuffed her full of heparin and sent her home for "a rest from the ward" she would neither have been discharged nor would she be treated by the system as having self-discharged. The fact that this meant that her room would remain empty and incapable of use by a more needy patient in the night because she was notionally still on the ward was of no consequence, apparently. Don'tcha just love the NHS and the mysterious ways in which it moves in order to perform its many and various wonders ?

As for Molly, she has managed to put on 210g in 2 days and has been discharged from Wycombe, subject to anything showing up on her latest blood test. She has completely transformed during that period in terms of temperament and behaviour. She is doing very well indeed. She still has to have her antibiotics and will have to have a kidney scan on 26 January, but apart from that she has been given the green light.

Lenny and Lesley-Anne have had their baby, a little girl, Lois Emily - congratulations to them. Thankfully they seem to have had a really easy time of it. About time someone from our NCT group did.

Hopefully, in a few days we will feel sufficiently confident to crack open some more of that pink champagne and be 'at home' to visitors generally.