art plays vital role in patients' recovery

Tristan at the Emotional Blackmailer's Handbook knows exactly how I feel. Click on the picture.

Dear readers, I am celebrating the first full day of my gall-free existence with a quick peruse of yesterday's Evening Standard: the winds of change are indeed, it would seem, upon us. I entered the hospital yesterday inspired, doubtless like so many others, by Gordon Brown's promise to "do his utmost."* I was further cheered by having spent the previous night laughing like a drain at a vintage Newsnight (Paxo: "But you haven't even said anything yet! It's all waffle!") (and someone else: "Oh, I think Brown's utter lack of charisma will be good for the country. Most people have had enough of charisma."). There was a baby-faced MP with improbable eyelashes who had talked - "waffled" - in really Blairite soundbites about the NHS' great strides forward, so I put my experiences of March behind me and walked into the Homerton with a light heart (and a light handbag) and a rather heavy gall-bladder.

I left many hours later with a light head, a heavy bag (full of assorted prescription painkillers, anti-ulcer pills to protect me from the painkillers, and some strange antibiotics more normally prescribed - apparently - for gonorrhea, but given me in this instance because they are also used to treat "infections that have moved to the blood"), a distended abdomen and, thank Gord, no gall bladder.

It turns out that the injurious organ was far worse off than the doddle and mollycoddle they had said they anticipated. Riddled; raddled; inflamed, infected and inflated; and, most disgustingly, full of pus - a fact which the chirpy doctor repeated three times, in terms that made me wonder how the hundreds of stones had even fitted in. Maybe that's why they were being squeezed into the corridor. Anyway, as she said, it rather accounts for the parlousness of the past months! And I now feel less like a weed... rather, am a little retrospectively shocked.

Lesson learnt? Even last night I thought I would get by on one painkiller, one tablet of; within two hours I was scrabbling for the other painkiller and other tablet, and this morning have cheerfully taken all four pills, though the food I was supposed to have them with went down less happily. The other lesson seems to be about not moving around, but the codeine should help with that. The incision below my belly button seems to bleed every time I try to get out of bed.

The Baroque sis was perfection itself, the Florence Nightingale of Hackney. 24 hours after landing at Heathrow she came to the hospital with me and was patience and fortitude in one for the next 13 hours. She even mopped my brow with a cool damp cloth, in that first grim hour of coming round, and it is amazing how it helped. I don't think anyone's ever done that to me before. (She is still, as I write this, asleep now.)

Sis has a funny story - I remember the incident but don't remember it as funny, however it seems to have cheered her day immensely. She says when I had come back to myself a bit I said to her, "Oh God, I feel terrible. Can I have my bag? I want my jewellery."

And now, back to my twilight doze, to wait for the next guest post. If they're all as good as Chippy's I may just have to give these guys my blog.

* I for one would have jolly well hoped so - after all, you're the the prime minister now, Gord! You'd better not sit around all day doing the crossword and playing fantasy football! I mean, I've seen "The Office"...