Post major brain surgery for trucluant tumour: Fun and Frolics at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol
It is 7a.m. on Thursday morning, January 10, 2008. I am awake and starving hungry. I am in the High Dependency section of Ward One at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, 14 hours on from being wheeled out of theatre after five hours of major surgery to remove a fast growing tumour in my brain that was not so slowly trying to kill me.
Just two and a bit short months ago, it – the potentially killer tumour – was supposed to have been a nicely containable small one. I’d taken to calling it, with derision and a fair degree of hate and humour, my “bog standard brain tumour”.
A nurse is by my side, smiling, saying good morning and would I like an all-over wash, right there in the hospital bed? I have no idea. Would I? I say I think I’d rather have a shower, taking full advantage of the new and bursting to the brim sponge bag I’d bought not so very long ago, especially for such occasions, but she tells me that’s not such a good idea right now.
I wonder why, then see the drip attached to my arm. The smiley nurse reminds me it is delivering neat morphine to me, if I should need it, simply by me pressing the button that seems glued to my left hand. But that it will be disconnected later that morning. She then asks if I’d mind if she took my blood pressure before the bed wash? I say not all and remember I’ve been having my blood pressure and temperature taken – and goodness knows what else - at two hourly intervals throughout the night.
I discard to a plastic bag, temporary wash-bin, my first pair of £5 Matalan jim-jams which someone must have put me in last night and which I notice are now very sweaty indeed, not to mention stinky, and subject myself to the bed wash, behind closed cubicle curtains. It is remarkably refreshing but I make a mental note to have a shower tomorrow morning, if not just a little bit later today - far more civilised and private.
It will also mean I can do my make-up. And look at what I am assured, by John Boy, is, remarkably, no more than a “finger of fudge” sized dressing, lost and almost invisible in my mop of still-there hair. Essential, vanity things to do, when you are a girlie of 51, stuck in the mindset of a 31-year-old, with a new scar, neat and very narrow, stapled up by metal stitches, running down the right side of your head, just down to your ear, holding together a skull taken partially apart by a wonderful neurosurgeon to invade raw brain tissue to excavate a bit of a tricky brain tumour that had been causing havoc with my life.
With the cubicle curtains still closed and the rest of the ward closed off to me and out of sight, I realise what I also need is a pee. Urgently. A bed pan is offered but I again have a flash back to last night, just after theatre, when the same thing was offered and I’d rejected it then – some ridiculous recycled and seemingly highly unstable cardboard contraption - as impossible to use, half perching, half lying on a hospital bed, and opted for a wheel-in, wheel-out bedside commode instead, having been told such things were available.
What I’d really wanted, back then, was to leg it down the ward to find and use a proper, stable and fully plumbed–in china loo, knowing that such things existed in hospitals, but was told, in no uncertain terms, that was not on, so soon after major brain surgery.
With much consternation from nurses, a bedside commode had been wheeled in for me and I’d hauled myself and my drips out of bed to use it. Just putting my feet on the hospital floor as I made the three-step journey had felt like heaven and freedom.
I recount this little tale to the morning’s smiley nurse, who says, “Well done you”, but also rejects the notion of me stepping down the ward to use a proper loo, using the morphine drip attachment as some kind of excuse. A bedside commode is duly wheeled in and, fully conscious this time round, I give not a hoot that smiley nursey is just behind the curtains as I have my pee in relative private. She explains she is on curtain duty just in case I fall. As falling anywhere is the last thing on my mind, I accept my lot. For the moment.
Breakfast is mentioned and, with hunger pangs now on red alert, I get temporarily very excited before considering that what I really want is strawberry pavlova. My hubby John Boy and I had been out for a last, fabulous, pre-op roast and all the trimmings dinner at Penny and Phillip Bond’s back at home on Sunday night.
Fellow friends Janet and Richard Price had bought one of the puds – a stonking home-made pavlova which Janet is renowned for – and I just knew there would still be some left in Penny’s fridge. There had been when we left the dinner party.
While the breakfast trolley is wheeled up to my bed, together with my morning’s allocation of drugs, which include the steroids I have been on since Christmas Day and which seem to account for my current, unaccountable sweet-tooth, I see a load of toast and nicely ask for some. Disappointment descends as I am advised there is no marmite. Not even those useless little ten pence sized catering jobbies they seem to dole out with toast all over the place these days.
A glass of water comes with and for the drugs, plus a cup of very strong tea, as requested. I scoff down the toast, swig down the drugs with the water and sling down the tea, virtually in one. The tea, in its little green cup and saucer, is gone, finished, just as the breakfast trolley, together with the lovely lady serving things from it, troll off back down the ward together.
Still hankering after Janet Price’s strawberry pavlova, which I am convinced is still lurking in Penny Bond’s fridge, and more tea, which I don’t ask for in case it is rude to, I then ask if I can have or use a telephone. I need to ring John Boy and get him round to the Bond’s house before they leave for work, but there doesn’t seem to be one of those pay-as-you-go phone contraptions, usually combined with a telly, next to my little bed at my little end of the ward.
I never even consider the reality that there is not a scandalously expensive to use, combi-phone and TV by me, because I am in the high dependency section of the ward. And not expected to be able to use one, never mind ask for one.
A phone arrives from somewhere and, like ET on his first visit to planet earth, I ring home. I am astounded and extremely disconcerted to hear my own voice on the answer machine. Has John Boy had the answer machine switched on all night while anything could have happened to a newly brain drilled me, twenty five or so miles away from home?
I leave a message saying so, in no uncertain terms, followed by an absolute demand that he gets himself out of bed, where I unfairly imagine him to be - and where I am not but wish I was - and up to Phil and Penny’s to raid their fridge for the left over pavlova and bring it over to me, in Frenchay hospital, instantly. Together with a big flask of tea, complaining there is absolutely none on the ward at all. And, if he can’t find a flask – I cannot recall precisely at that moment if we even have one still intact – to borrow one from Penny and Phil, who I am convinced will have.
The phone must have been taken away from me, probably because, as I later learn, the ward sister is herself ringing John Boy, who answers the phone straight away. He was not in bed but in the shower, having had phone calls since goodness knows what hour of the morning as well as about ten thousand late into the night before.
Still dripping from his morning shower, John Boy had already got my morphine ranting message and rung the Bond’s to request the left-over pavlova and been told, very kindly, that today was Thursday, the dinner party had been on Sunday and the rest of the pavolova in their fridge had been long gone since Monday night. Penny had said she would sort something interim out, after work, for his visit to me that evening.
During his phone call from the ward, John Boy was also assured he did not have to worry about tea – or flasks of the stuff – for me, because the ward and indeed, the hospital as a whole, had lots of its own. They advised him to come in at lunchtime and not before, so I could get some sleep. While they weaned me off the morphine. Neurosurgeon, Prof Hugh Coakham, would be in to see us both, they told him, at about 1.30p.m.
The Boy, intent on going to work in Bristol that morning to keep himself marginally sane, but having originally planned to have gone in late via a largely over-long and circular route from North Somerset to Frenchay and then back into the city centre, had said he’d be in at 1p.m.
Back in my bed on Ward One at Frenchay it is only something like 8.35 a.m. and although fed, clean and fresh in my next and latest pair of £5 Matalan jim-jams, I am bored and still hooked up to the morphine drip. And still desperate for pavlova.
I want to get out of bed and walk and have a horrible feeling the morphine drip is being used to contain me but am assured it will be taken out soon. Following a change of shift in nursing staff, I have a message back from a new smiley nurse telling me my John Boy will be in at lunchtime and Prof Coakham just a little later, while The Boy is here. I calculate I have four hours to fill. Not a thought to relish but at least a thought and a minor calculation my scalpel and drill-invaded brain can still make.
I wave and smile again at the girl in the bed opposite me. She mouths she has had virtually the same operation as me but then, like last night, which I recall so vividly now, when we waved to each other, post operation, like strangers in the half dark, she starts crying. This girl, who is called Ruth, must be 20 years younger then me, and I wonder what the heck she can be doing with a brain tumour and why she seems unable to move her right arm at all. Caring nurses go to her and curtains are pulled around her.
In the relatively short time I have been told I have a brain tumour – a glioma - I have read, by chance, two major feature stories in the Sunday papers about young children with similar conditions. In both instances, advanced and very aggressive tumours. Their stories, and those of their parents, were not just valiant but heartbreaking. Full of hope, fight and determination for young lives caught out by a strange and abnormal growth of, in their cases, cancer forming brain cells for which there is, as yet, no medical or scientific reason or explanation.
It is bad enough to have a tumour in your brain in your fifties. In your thirties – as Ruth surely is – it must be intolerable. When you have yet to reach the age of ten, with your whole life ahead of you, it must be impossible. I wonder how parents of these little young people retain their strength and their sanity and an ability to keep upbeat and positive, along with their children.
Reflecting on this impossible dilemma, it is the first and only time so far that I equate brain tumours with cancer, in relation to me. I put the thought straight out of my mind. Never to be considered again.
As far as I and my neurologist are concerned, my little tumour, pre-op, kicked off as a low grade, slow growing glioma – grade one or possibly grade two.
According to the brilliant website, www.cancerbackup, a grade one glioma, which I have obviously mentally bracketed myself into, as no-one has yet told me conclusively – or, indeed, to the contrary - registers on the cancer rictar scale as the “least malignant” of all. Only grade four goes off the scale as the “most malignant.” Meaning, the most cancerous.
These runaway little thoughts of mine make me suddenly very tired and me and my morphine drip turn over for a little kip. Next thing I know there’s another charming nurse there at my bedside, wanting to do my two-hourly Holby City style “Obs”. I say yes, thank you, and can you take out the morphine drip too, please, at the same time. The nurse says that will be in about half an hour.
I look over to Ruth in the bed opposite, who is not even smiling between tears now. I burrow down in my hospital issue sheet and blanket, so Ruth doesn’t have to see me looking at her, only because she is, after all, straight in front of me, but, mostly, so I avoid, inadvertently, looking directly at her, adding to her clearly abject misery and distress. In doing so, I snooze for half an hour or so.
It is 11a.m. and a nurse arrives to unhook me from the morphine. This is freedom time. No longer chained to a drip. I am ecstatic. I say I’m heading down the ward to find the loos there and the nurse beside me obviously thinks I’m mental.
But I’m asking her if she’d mind pulling out the bag, behind and to the right of me, in the locker, so I can get out my sponge bag and my flat-pack black fleece dressing gown – not the big bear fluffy fleece number that has featured so prominently in my and My Boy’s tumour-induced seizure and hospital dramas to date – and reach over myself to the left hand side to grab my tall black sheepskin Ugg boots, a Christmas pressie from John Boy, tucked, as they lovingly are, under the chair there.
The boots are on my feet faster than she can say “no”. I am in the flat-pack fleece dressing gown, sponge bag in my hand and I am on my feet and heading down the ward.
I pass the nurses station, which I clearly haven’t really seen before from my end of the ward and, unaware that the nurse who unhooked me from the morphine is hot on my tail, just about right behind me in fact, get stopped and asked where I’m going. I say, “The toilet”. They say, “It’s back behind you.”
With my sense of direction – pretty poor at the best of times and currently completely flipped, it is a conversation that will be repeated umpteen times in the next 28 hours before I am moved to a different “posh recovery” hospital, under John Boy’s work related private medical insurance cover for me.
The morphine disconnecting nurse is back at my side again and insists on coming with me. And on me keeping the loo door just partially open, showing me the fast-pull dangling orange cord emergency alarm thing in there. I am quite happy with this and with the loo I find in there. It is a real one. Not on wheels. How wonderful. I come out, wash my hands and say I just want to clean my face and put on some make-up and shove my hair up and she shows me yet another handy orange cord jobbie to pull if needed before going to stand guard, only just outside what I’ve decided to call the washroom.
I check out the hair in the mirror above the wash basins. Disaster. It is half flattened and crazy and wild as anything. The “finger of fudge”dressing on the surgery section of my skull is exactly as John Boy described it. A “finger of fudge”. Hardly visible in between the hair. Remarkable. Thank you, Prof Coakham.
The face is another matter, but that has nothing to do with the Prof. It’s the face I was in before I came into hospital. And it looks pretty worn out. Distorted too, a bit, by hamster cheeks and jowls caused by the steroids I’ve been pumping into my body twice a day in accordance with doctor’s orders, since Christmas Day.
Conscious of the time the charming morphine disconnecting nurse is having to stand ‘on guard’, I freshen up, clean my teeth, slap on some make up, gingerly trawl a brush though my hair and then try to shove it up. I have one of those big tooth LisaClip things – dead easy to use to hold up the most unruly of hair – but all I can do is get a clump of it up at the back and instead of clipping it all firmly in the middle, clip it to the left side instead. Three attempts later and the result is just the same. My left hand is a bit odd. Or maybe my brain is. No bother. Time for me and my sponge bag to go.
I am escorted back to my bed but only really want to sit on it, not get in it. Only an hour and a half now to go till John Boy arrives. I decide to go and talk to Ruth, in the bed opposite. Who is not crying at the moment. But smiling at me.
I introduce myself properly and, like some kind of idiot, I later realise, try and shake her hand. My right hand to her right hand. As you do. Ruth starts to cry. She says it is her right hand that is making her cry. She has no feeling in it and cannot move it. I woffle on about a bit of numbness in my left hand which I have only just clocked, in the washroom place, and realise I am saying totally the wrong thing, so shut up.
Ruth, who has lots of luscious, shortish, curlyish dark hair and no visible skull dressing either, says her eyes are also making her cry. She cannot move them up above her immediate, straight-ahead line of vision. Without excruciating, migraine-like pain. Which she has been in, because of that, almost since she came round from the op. She says she is sorry but can’t talk right now and, totally humbled and distraught for her, I head back to my bed, just opposite, as nurses come to hers.
I am truly shocked by Ruth and her distress and can only wonder if she had my Prof Coakham to do her op. She did not, it turns out, but that, it seems is not the point. All neurosurgeons are brilliant beings. Brain tumours, like recovery from operations to remove them - and biopsy results and the prognosis resulting from those – vary in each and every case, whatever they may or may not think before you go into theatre.
The brain and its connected and crucial central nervous system control your very being. Even in the 21st century, the brain and all its protective tissue remains something of an enigma. It is not until you get in there, when something is manifestly wrong – and, if indeed you can get in there in the first place – that you can begin to get a handle on what is going on inside. Only neurosurgeons and their amazing, specialist support teams can do that and they are few and far between.
At this stage I clearly can’t tell Ruth any of this at all – even if she’d want to hear it, right now – because I don’t know half of it myself. I am just sat on a hospital bed, in Frenchay, with what I hope is most of my own offending brain tumour removed and with My Boy’s Christmas Ugg boots on, which I didn’t get to open until four and a half days after Christmas, because I was in Weston General Hospital, from December 25 to December 29, laughing and joking in between being apparently seriously poorly after my “bog standard tumour” decided to go mad and trigger five nasty, uncontrollable seizures in a row. All on Christmas Day.
Time is dragging on Ward One and I am restless beyond restlessness. I am also constipated. What joy. I decide an illegal ciggie in the grounds outside is called for. Bound to help get things moving in the bowel department. Having already proved I can walk unaided, I secret the pack of ciggies and lighter I had already secreted in my holdall at home, into the pocket of my flat-pack fleece dressing gown and, putting new black Ugg boots forward, together with a matching black 60s-style wool cap acquired in the sale from Valerie Webber’s Winscombe clothes shop, march down the ward.
The inquisition starts at the central nurses’ station, which I try to by-pass. No chance. “Where are you going?” they ask, nicely, having clearly clocked the Beatles-esque cap, which was, remarkably for our wonderful little village of Winscombe, made in New York. “The loos are behind you.” I stop, smile and say I’m going out for a breath of fresh air. They say I can’t go out on my own and to not even think about it. I admit I want a ciggie.
They exchange glances. “Not on,” they say. I say they can’t stop me from going outside. They say they can because someone has to be with me if I so much as leave the ward and no-one will be, especially if I’m even thinking of lighting up. I say I need a ciggie to relieve constipation. They say they will bring me a Senopod or two. To my bed.
I ask when I will be a walk outside. They say when your husband gets here and not before. And only with him, and with me in a wheelchair. At the mere mention of my beloved husband, I realise I’m in for double trouble. John Boy is likely to go as bananas as the nurses clearly are for me even thinking of having a ciggie. They seem stunned enough that I am already walking, independently, to the loo.
I stroll back to my lonesome bed, steam a bit, and wish My Boy would just get a move on. Where is he, anyway? Twenty minutes later, he arrives, looking lovely, but without any signs of pavlova about his person. I rage. He explains and tells me all will be sorted by evening. I tell him he’s the only one who can take me out so I can have a ciggie. I think the nursing Gestapo have already got to him on the way in and he knows I’m distorting the truth in my mission to inhale nicotine. My latest, absolute passion of the moment.
John Boy placates me by saying we can get some fresh air later – after the Prof has been to see us. I remind him that is not for ages yet and then, as if by some pre-arranged, distracting magic, our great friend Lizzie Frith arrives, looking her usual tall, blonde, glamorous and elegant self.
Lizzie, who back in the mid to late 1980s, used to own and run Tizzie Lizzie’s ball gown and wedding dress shop in Redland’s Cotham Hill, has long since retrained as a recruitment consultant and, by sheer chance, started a three month contract at Frenchay hospital on Monday, January 7, two days before I came in for my op. She has taken time out from her lunch-break to blag her way into the ward to see me.
I prattle on to Lizzie about the missing pavlova, my persistent pangs for it and the lost cig opportunity, just as a nurse is dropping by to do my “Obs”. The nurse clocks the conversation and interjects with, “I won’t stop you and cannot. But you know our views.” John Boy looks at me as if to say, “I told you so. They are my views too.” I ignore the look and tell Lizzie how lovely she and her equally lovely, very blonde hair look. She tells me how amazing I look and knowing I look like a total potato head, seriously consider, for the first time ever, booking myself in for some kind of face lift and general overhaul when this is all over.
Prof Hugh Coakham arrives and Lizzie gingerly hugs me as she makes tracks to leave, saying she’ll pop in tomorrow too. I hug her straight back, with absolute force, just wishing I could leave with her.
The Prof and his incredible smiling eyes tell John Boy and me the operation went really well, all things considered; that he was able to get out much more of the tumour than he’d thought possible, without damaging the brain tissue. He asks about both my hands - right and left - and I say right, absolutely fine, left slightly dodgy.
He asks me to grip his hand with my left hand and I do, with as much show-off power as I can muster. I tell him I’ve already been up and about that morning, legging it down the ward and that John Boy and I are taking a trip outside in just a bit. I do not mention the cig mission. The Prof tells me I am doing remarkably, if not incredibly well. I gloat. John Boy gleams.
The Prof takes his leave, saying he will see us tomorrow, Friday, at 4p.m.at the Glen Spire hospital in Bristol’s Clifton where I am being moved to. He confirms a private ambulance has been booked, thanks to the Boy’s private medical cover for me, to transfer me there, around about lunchtime. And that he hopes to have the biopsy results from the tumour with him then. Jolly good, I say, but wonder why on earth it is I might need an ambulance, private or not. Aren’t I up and about, eating, talking and laughing?
We all say cheerio and I ask John to take me on that walk, re-pocketing my illicit pack of ciggies. I take John Boy’s arm in advance of reaching the central nurses station, just to prove I have My Boy to lean on. Not surprisingly we are stopped at Check-Point Nursey. They say I need a wheel chair but don’t seem to have one around, just at the moment. Can we wait? I say we cannot and that I have My Boy and his arm, not to mention the whole of his body with me. We are allowed through Check-Point but told not to be long.
We are not. We turn right out of the ward and right again though a door and onto a path. It is fresh and lovely out here. The sky is blue. The air crisp. I ruin it straight away by lighting up. John Boy looks anxious and embarrassed but no-one is passing. The cig makes me dizzy but I persist and light another straight away. John Boy looks disgusted but has been married to me far too long to know to try and stop me doing anything I have set my mind to.
Cigs done, we head back inside, buzzing the security buzzer to regain access to Ward One. I announce it is us and someone is there in a flash to let us in. We stop to say hello at Check-Point Nursey and almost hear their inaudible sighs of relief. They also mention that a wheelchair has arrived back on the ward and would I like it for the trip back to my bed? I decline, saying I’m enjoying My Boy’s arm and the snugness of the sheepskin inside my new Ugg boots far too much for that.
Back at the bed, I agree to get in it, before John Boy leaves, saying he’ll be back in at about 7p.m. With the morphine drip well gone, I am given a couple of Paracetamol capsules, just in case my head starts going off on one.
The Senapods – or whatever they are called and however they are spelt – seem forgotten – even though I am still constipated. The cigs did not work their usual magic, but I can’t really tell the nurses that, which is a bit daft, as they must be able to smell the smoke on me, anyway. I think I sleep because next thing I know it is tea time and the food trolley and the drugs are doing their rounds. I have no idea what I eat but know I do. And drink tea – at least two cups of the stuff while the trolley lurks by my bed.
I get up to go to the loo and washroom place, to spruce up for My Boy’s arrival, missing the right turning to it, as usual. A nurse is allocated from Check-Point Nursey to come with me. In the mirror I decide I look a fright and need to wash my hair. I am told I can’t, so soon after the op. Any hair wash will have to wait for at least a week.
Accepting that as there appears to be only a “finger of fudge” dressing covering a four or five inch scar running down the right side of my head which is stapled together to hold my brains in, all within a skull now fixed back in place by titanium screws and superglue, I concede on this one but resolve to take a shower, regardless, tomorrow morning, wearing my hideous white shower cap that brings back horrible memories of my first, sudden and unexpected early morning seizure at home, at Towerhead, on October 26 last year. It seems like a decade and many hospital stays ago.
John Boy comes bounding in, proudly carrying a little Quality Street tin. I am unaware that, in my end section of the ward – the HDU bit - flowers and the like are banned. A big bold notice says so but I haven’t noticed it yet. The tin is plonked with relish on my lap.
The Boy opens it for me. Inside is a little, perfect, strawberry pavolva. Penny Bond has made it for me and apologises, via the Boy, that the base is from M&S in Weston which she dashed into on her way home from work. I am thrilled and touched beyond words and promptly devour it, with no thought of sharing even a morsel with The Boy.
John Boy asks me if Donna has called. Thinking he means called in, I say no. She’s in Glasgow, when not in Arta on the northern side of Majorca, where she has a fabulous apartment. John Boy says no, has Donna rung. Do I remember her ringing?
I do not, but apparently she did. This morning. I have no recollection. Donna has because she called The Boy back to ask if I was really okay. She’d been on the phone to me, which a nurse had kindly bought over to my bed, and, for a full ten minutes, I’d talked about pavlova and a severe absence of tea and called her Jackie. I’ve known Donna since she was 17 and I was 19. She will be 50 this year. John had told Donna not to worry. It had been the morphine talking.
I worry I’m losing my marbles but John Boy says, “No way. You’re doing just fine. Brilliantly, in fact.” So I ask him to take me out for a ciggie. Donna would appreciate this, but demand at least two glasses of wine to go with it. As I would too, normally.
With Ugg boots on, the black Beatles-style cap too and the flat-pack fleece dressing gown tied tight over my jim-jams, we pass Check-Point Nursey and, for the first time. voluntarily report in, to check-out. A wheelchair is again offered but I decline. I truly need to stretch my legs. We go further down the little path this time and turn the corner to a bit of the building that houses Ward One and where there are no windows, which do not seem to be covered by either curtains or blinds at night.
John Boy supports me all the way as well as when we get there and whips off his suede jacket to drape over my shoulders for extra warmth. It is welcome. The night air is cold. John Boy tells me snow is forecast for tomorrow.
While John Boy despairs, I smoke two cigs in quick succession and look forward to the snow. I just love snow. As a kid growing up in Macclesfield, on the Cheshire/Derbyshire border, real, deep snow was an annual fixture in most of our winters. It always stuck and it always stayed. For at least a week or more. Or so I will always remember. Just ask my brother.
With what I am sure is doomed to be my entire night’s illegal nicotine intake complete, John Boy takes me back inside and back into the ward. My walking no longer seems to amaze the folk manning Check-Point Nursey and there seems to be some kind of truce on the unmentioned – and unmentionable - cig intake. I think The Boy must have had words about his exceedingly strong willed wife.
It is about 8.30p.m. and John Boy has to go. Drugs are to be dished out and more “Obs” taken. The Boy has a host of phone calls to make and emails reporting on my condition to write and send. We, kiss, we hug, sharing our love for each other and the sheer joy of the two of us surviving this together. Tomorrow is another day and by lunchtime we will be leaving the wonderful team of nurses on Frenchay’s Ward One. We - or I at least - will also be escaping Check-Point Nursey.
John Boy has already phoned ahead to the private Glen Spire hospital in Clifton to advise them his wife is a nicotine nut. They have advised him smoking is not allowed on the hospital grounds at all but if his wife is daft enough to want to smoke she can do so near the exit, on the public pavement.
Having had my initial MRI scans done at the Glen Spire I remember the exit, which doubles as the entrance too. It is up a flight of brick-laid stairs, immediately opposite the main door into the hospital. Easy-peasey pie for me and my Ugg boots and proper, outdoor clothes, now currently sitting, redundant, in the locker beside me. Whether it is snowing tomorrow or not, I can’t wait to get there. How wrong I will be. Gestapo-style anti-smoking nursey tactics will prove to be out in equal force, if, in fact, not even more force, at the Glen - particularly among the night nurses. And that won't be the only shocker. News on the old brain front has yet to come. And it will. Big time.
www.westonhospicecare.org.uk
www.coakham.com
www.cancerbackup.org.uk