Boxing Day and The Gall Baldder
Without Prejudice
It was going to be hot, brutally so. Yvette and I covered the car as best we could to keep out the heat.
We'd had to park a long way from the entry and that would become important later.
We dog trotted the distance from the car park to the entry to Myers, it was Boxing Day, 2003. We were there to work the sales day and already the car park was almost full at 8am. We had been directed where to park as staff for the day.
We had worked at Myers before through a casual agency doing their stocktakes. We greeted other casual staff we knew. And then we all trooped inside for our instructions by our Boss, a lovely funny English man who motivated and rewarded us, Dave.
Yvette and I were assigned duties as security on the Ladies dressing rooms, 5 items each and we were off. We stood behind the small counter in the dressing room ready to be "door bitches".
We knew it would be busy but we were prepared for the rush and busied ourselves hanging hangers and tidying the counter and making sure the dressing rooms were clean.
The rush when it came was like tsunami of people the like of which Yvette and I had never seen.
A surging wall of people and the small waiting cubicle in front of us was suddenly packed solid. We rapidly handed out tokens with the number of items and tried to keep our growing panic under control.
People were lined up around the floor, men and women and kids. It was a seething mass of waiting people.
Our first break came at 9.30 and it seemed like only minutes since we had started. We were able to make our way outside and have some morning tea.
So hot outside and we sat in the sun a few minutes and I began to feel nauseous and a pain under my ribs.
It was a familair pain from 10 years before, a gall bladder attack. I had one stone and since I had an attack years before was so careful about what I ate.
But I ruefully recalled the previous day, Christmas day at Alena's and tempted had eaten a tiny square of crackling. It wasn't even a crunchy bit, a chewy rubber bit about a quarter inch square.
Wasn't worth it, believe me. So I told Yvette,
"I'm not feeling well"
"Mum, you can't not feel well, we're on $23.00 an hour."
"Well , I can tell you know, I'm not well, I think I am having a gall bladder attack, take me to the sick room"
So she did, I was writhing in pain, the pain savage, "Like a knife up under my ribs".
The dear sweet "Black and White" ladies attended to me in the sick room, hands fluttering in anxiety as to what to do. I was in agony.
Dave arrived concerned and sent Yvette off to fetch the car and bring it as close to the entrance as possible.
There was no way an Ambulance could get in to the Shopping Centre with its 100,000.00 demented sales frenzy shoppers that day. Yvette had to be radioed in by two way as she made her way to the Myers entry.
We knew we could get out as the traffic was incoming, and Yvette and Dave bundled me into the front seat of the car.
Yvette said,
"Where to??"
Nearest Hospital, have to be Clayton
Yvette swung out into the traffic,
"We have to stop for petrol", Yvette said groaning at the wait.
She did it as quickly as she could as I lolled my head out the window like a riding dog, and as she disappeared my body decided it wanted to throw up.
I glanced around frantically and found a plastic bag. Yvette reentered the car just as I threw up and she wound down her window and we raced off. Yvette is a great driver, fast and risk taking, like a man and we were at the Hospital Emergency within minutes.
I can't remember the booking in, I can't remember Yvette completing the paperwork I was semi awake in the land of pain. Just red hot writhing fog like pain, where all sound is muffled and your body shrieks for relief.
Alena arrived and bullied the nurse into giving me morphine and then I was in la la land, hovering somewhere up on the roof. I was looking down at my body and it felt really good.
There was a blurry trip to the xray room. Seeing a big screen in front of me and one big gall stone the size of a golf ball.
The doctor, who I fell in love with, of course, stated my options, surgery to take out the stone, or take out the stone and gall bladder?
Even I was off my head on morphine, I semi sat up and grabbed the doctor,
"take it out", the whole thing, just rip it out, OK???"
And as I said Take it out I swooped my free arm in a big arc, almost overbancing off the bed.
I didn't care I just wanted it out and even though incoherent and dazed I knew I didn't want to have to come back at a further stage and have another operation. They are never pleasant.
And that was that. Alena said I was making no sense whatsoever, slurring my words and drooling.
The next day I woke up to a sea of pain and a morphine drip in my arm and it was over. I could remember the nurses trying to wake me up.
A whirring fan noise and cold, cold and as ever my low blood pressure plummeted and I felt like I was down a dark well and climbing towards light.
A girlfriend said when she came out of her bad operation after having a baby she saw the devil sitting on her left. She told him really loudly to go away. He came for her twice she said, never resisting, she knew she had a baby somewhere who needed her alive.
Wonder how much we dream or hallucinate while we are coming out of an operation, the room all quiet, except for the next door old man with breathing problems.
I believe Grace saw the devil. She's fairly psychic as am I and another friend.
So I hovered somewhere on the roof as I recovered and pumped the morphine gently, not wanting to be addicted.
My old ex Nev came to see me. He was drunk and sweating and bought me an open can of bourbon, a reduced price soft drink, some grapes and a cucumber. Alena laughed at him and he was being a pest, so I called security and had him removed.
I ate the grapes and drank the drinks and gave the cucumber to the nurses for their lunch. Nev is nuts, his brain fried from years of drinking, he always used to be "wasted" at that time of the morning.
It's funny as the other side of him is quiet, bookish, nerdy almost, too quiet, probably.
Alena had left and I grabbed my stand, shuffled out of the bed and went out into the hall and just called out for someone to call security. He was supposedly not drunk, just "tired," the waves of alcohol coming off him.
So I rested and rested and then by tea time, shuffled out into the hall again and all I could say was,
"pain, pain", I gasped pointing to my shoulders.
The dreaded air pumped into my abdomen for the operation causing bubbles of air into joints. I literally could not speak, just grunt the word over and over.
So better the next day and lots of whining from me. wanting the girls to run after me and get this and that. I am terrible when I am infirm, I just want to shoot myself at the boredom.
I want out straight away and home, sweet home. I hate hospitals with a passion, no matter how luxurious.
I was enraged the next day at my confinement, raging at the fates. A lovely man came to see me the next day an old friend, Omy, and he bought me a big display of flowers and I saw him and grabbed him and said,
"Would you take me home please?"
Poor man standing there with the beautiful big display of flowers, but he took me home, I picked up my car on the way.
I was so glad to be home I could have danced, except I was in too much pain. And I recovered really quickly, not even sore and I thanked God for great doctor's and good nursing staff.
I went back and took them some Xmas treats and I was all smiles. Instead of the cranky she devil, trapped in bed.
I loved being home and just went straight back into restoring it for sale, which we did later that year and I began to think about permanent housing without a man. mine, just mine.
Love Janette
It was going to be hot, brutally so. Yvette and I covered the car as best we could to keep out the heat.
We'd had to park a long way from the entry and that would become important later.
We dog trotted the distance from the car park to the entry to Myers, it was Boxing Day, 2003. We were there to work the sales day and already the car park was almost full at 8am. We had been directed where to park as staff for the day.
We had worked at Myers before through a casual agency doing their stocktakes. We greeted other casual staff we knew. And then we all trooped inside for our instructions by our Boss, a lovely funny English man who motivated and rewarded us, Dave.
Yvette and I were assigned duties as security on the Ladies dressing rooms, 5 items each and we were off. We stood behind the small counter in the dressing room ready to be "door bitches".
We knew it would be busy but we were prepared for the rush and busied ourselves hanging hangers and tidying the counter and making sure the dressing rooms were clean.
The rush when it came was like tsunami of people the like of which Yvette and I had never seen.
A surging wall of people and the small waiting cubicle in front of us was suddenly packed solid. We rapidly handed out tokens with the number of items and tried to keep our growing panic under control.
People were lined up around the floor, men and women and kids. It was a seething mass of waiting people.
Our first break came at 9.30 and it seemed like only minutes since we had started. We were able to make our way outside and have some morning tea.
So hot outside and we sat in the sun a few minutes and I began to feel nauseous and a pain under my ribs.
It was a familair pain from 10 years before, a gall bladder attack. I had one stone and since I had an attack years before was so careful about what I ate.
But I ruefully recalled the previous day, Christmas day at Alena's and tempted had eaten a tiny square of crackling. It wasn't even a crunchy bit, a chewy rubber bit about a quarter inch square.
Wasn't worth it, believe me. So I told Yvette,
"I'm not feeling well"
"Mum, you can't not feel well, we're on $23.00 an hour."
"Well , I can tell you know, I'm not well, I think I am having a gall bladder attack, take me to the sick room"
So she did, I was writhing in pain, the pain savage, "Like a knife up under my ribs".
The dear sweet "Black and White" ladies attended to me in the sick room, hands fluttering in anxiety as to what to do. I was in agony.
Dave arrived concerned and sent Yvette off to fetch the car and bring it as close to the entrance as possible.
There was no way an Ambulance could get in to the Shopping Centre with its 100,000.00 demented sales frenzy shoppers that day. Yvette had to be radioed in by two way as she made her way to the Myers entry.
We knew we could get out as the traffic was incoming, and Yvette and Dave bundled me into the front seat of the car.
Yvette said,
"Where to??"
Nearest Hospital, have to be Clayton
Yvette swung out into the traffic,
"We have to stop for petrol", Yvette said groaning at the wait.
She did it as quickly as she could as I lolled my head out the window like a riding dog, and as she disappeared my body decided it wanted to throw up.
I glanced around frantically and found a plastic bag. Yvette reentered the car just as I threw up and she wound down her window and we raced off. Yvette is a great driver, fast and risk taking, like a man and we were at the Hospital Emergency within minutes.
I can't remember the booking in, I can't remember Yvette completing the paperwork I was semi awake in the land of pain. Just red hot writhing fog like pain, where all sound is muffled and your body shrieks for relief.
Alena arrived and bullied the nurse into giving me morphine and then I was in la la land, hovering somewhere up on the roof. I was looking down at my body and it felt really good.
There was a blurry trip to the xray room. Seeing a big screen in front of me and one big gall stone the size of a golf ball.
The doctor, who I fell in love with, of course, stated my options, surgery to take out the stone, or take out the stone and gall bladder?
Even I was off my head on morphine, I semi sat up and grabbed the doctor,
"take it out", the whole thing, just rip it out, OK???"
And as I said Take it out I swooped my free arm in a big arc, almost overbancing off the bed.
I didn't care I just wanted it out and even though incoherent and dazed I knew I didn't want to have to come back at a further stage and have another operation. They are never pleasant.
And that was that. Alena said I was making no sense whatsoever, slurring my words and drooling.
The next day I woke up to a sea of pain and a morphine drip in my arm and it was over. I could remember the nurses trying to wake me up.
A whirring fan noise and cold, cold and as ever my low blood pressure plummeted and I felt like I was down a dark well and climbing towards light.
A girlfriend said when she came out of her bad operation after having a baby she saw the devil sitting on her left. She told him really loudly to go away. He came for her twice she said, never resisting, she knew she had a baby somewhere who needed her alive.
Wonder how much we dream or hallucinate while we are coming out of an operation, the room all quiet, except for the next door old man with breathing problems.
I believe Grace saw the devil. She's fairly psychic as am I and another friend.
So I hovered somewhere on the roof as I recovered and pumped the morphine gently, not wanting to be addicted.
My old ex Nev came to see me. He was drunk and sweating and bought me an open can of bourbon, a reduced price soft drink, some grapes and a cucumber. Alena laughed at him and he was being a pest, so I called security and had him removed.
I ate the grapes and drank the drinks and gave the cucumber to the nurses for their lunch. Nev is nuts, his brain fried from years of drinking, he always used to be "wasted" at that time of the morning.
It's funny as the other side of him is quiet, bookish, nerdy almost, too quiet, probably.
Alena had left and I grabbed my stand, shuffled out of the bed and went out into the hall and just called out for someone to call security. He was supposedly not drunk, just "tired," the waves of alcohol coming off him.
So I rested and rested and then by tea time, shuffled out into the hall again and all I could say was,
"pain, pain", I gasped pointing to my shoulders.
The dreaded air pumped into my abdomen for the operation causing bubbles of air into joints. I literally could not speak, just grunt the word over and over.
So better the next day and lots of whining from me. wanting the girls to run after me and get this and that. I am terrible when I am infirm, I just want to shoot myself at the boredom.
I want out straight away and home, sweet home. I hate hospitals with a passion, no matter how luxurious.
I was enraged the next day at my confinement, raging at the fates. A lovely man came to see me the next day an old friend, Omy, and he bought me a big display of flowers and I saw him and grabbed him and said,
"Would you take me home please?"
Poor man standing there with the beautiful big display of flowers, but he took me home, I picked up my car on the way.
I was so glad to be home I could have danced, except I was in too much pain. And I recovered really quickly, not even sore and I thanked God for great doctor's and good nursing staff.
I went back and took them some Xmas treats and I was all smiles. Instead of the cranky she devil, trapped in bed.
I loved being home and just went straight back into restoring it for sale, which we did later that year and I began to think about permanent housing without a man. mine, just mine.
Love Janette
