I was then introduced to my new best friend, a zimmer frame, with which I learned to hop about the room, really just between the bed and the bathroom.
I was glad to see the sunrise through my window, breakfast was great including scrambled eggs with smoked salmon more decadent than I ever get at home! I don’t usually sleep on my back so it was unusual anyway, but fixed with one foot in a big boot and the other in the compression device was quite immobilising. I got used to its varying cycles of compression cycles some slow, some fast but all noisy. Mainly I was kept awake by the noise and activity of the mechanical calf compression device I had on my other leg. This had to be better than doing my own operating list that would have been scheduled for that time in my normal week! Later it was really nice to see my family and I felt pretty good. Loaded up with class A drugs, local anaesthetic blocks numbing my lower leg and foot most effectively, I felt dreamily comfortable and content.
You just wake up with no sense of the passage of time, and these days almost never in pain. Unlike natural sleep when you wake up realising that, hopefully, a large period of time has elapsed since you fell asleep with an anaesthetic you are essentially in a coma, unaware of any passage of time, it could be minutes, hours or for some patients seriously ill in an intensive care unit days or even weeks. That instant of the anaesthetic infusion taking rapid effect, I was concentrating on a mark on the ceiling above me and seeing it start to blur and move around – then waking up a couple of hours later in the recovery area. After a couple of hours it was a short hop along the corridor to theatre and although I have seen this process hundreds of times in my own patients, going to sleep is still a little scary but a marvel of modern surgery. I was dropped off at the local Spire Hospital by my wife who was off to Jury service, more about that bad timing later, settled into my room quickly, and seen by Mr Malik and my anaesthetist.
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