A View From (Outside) The Greenhouse; T’Fickle Finger Of T’Fate…..Innit?

Firstly, allow me to apologise for so quickly getting off the horse after spending such a long time out of the saddle (as it were) before getting back on it. The best laid plans of mice and men and all that old malarkey! My reader may recollect that last time around I returned to one of my recurring topics, that of the NHS and how, against all the odds, it remains the envy of the world. More of this later, but t’Gods of fate and happenstance were surely looking down on me as my two index fingers ferociously typed away, no doubt thinking that I hadn’t quite had my share of medical woes so far this year. I’d made up my mind that from the 9nd of February, at the latest, I’d start getting my backside in gear and do some work round at the greenhouse as well as at the computer desk. The devil makes slothful thoughts for idle minds and shitposting work for idle hands.

While I’d been “hors de combat” buildings and maintenance hadn’t been resting on its laurels and the shed was beginning to take on a tidier and more ordered appearance, in anticipation of a little visitor/helper making an appearance during the summer (should such a season ever arrive in the parts, what with the ongoing klimate katastrophe and all that).  The first task was the installation of shelves under the sink area, a two minute job for our highly skilled B&M team, bringing a welcome respite from constantly tripping over various buckets before kicking them the length of the shed whilst cursing their very existence, knocking at least one wellie over in the process. Any road up, one of the things that needed doing to make a “safe space” for the little one was to move the old kitchen larder cupboard along the wall and make a secure place for all the tools, probably behind the door. Straight forward enough, you might think, but an opportunity for both practical and aesthetic improvement can’t be overlooked where the opportunity arises (or so the B&M department believes).

Tools and other ephemera were evacuated to the outside (a rare dry day) but, as we slid the cabinet along the floor to it’s new home I saw a glint in an eye. “I’ve got an old double glazed window in the other shed”. Of course you have, I thought, because, on this old farmstead, we’re not really short of anything! “Why don’t I take off the internal ply cladding and see if I can make it fit without too much faffing about with the structure? It’ll give us more light, I’ve got a bit of worktop, too, I can make another open shelved unit on this side of the shed that we can set the propagators on and use as a potting bench.” “Have at it”, I said, mostly because it was an excellent idea but also because when the ideas come it’s best not to gainsay them. Here was a man on a mission.

Although the weather remained dull for the rest of the week it was at least dry and the shed renovations took a bit of a back seat (that’s a wet day job) while I set about weeding the raised beds in anticipation of firstly topping them up with compost, after giving them a dig over, and getting some onion sets in as soon as possible. B&M had other fish to fry, as will become clear. I enjoyed the work, because although I’ve been lifting a few weights, I haven’t really been doing anything very strenuous and had been looking forward to easing myself back into things. Time waits for no man, as we all come to learn.

Along with fitting the shelves under the shed sink, B&M department had been busy cutting and routing wood to replace an area of roof timbers. This is an ongoing project, as much preventative as restorative and it’s anticipated that it will take a couple of years or so (when time allows) to get the whole roof sorted, before returning to the support structure, which will eventually also be fully replaced. There’s a plan in place and I have no doubt it will be executed, but the prep work has taken up a great deal of time. Each glass frame section has had to be cut to length and routed out to make the groove to allow the glass to be able to slide in and out for ease of replacement, a job requiring both skill and patience. I doubt we’d still have a greenhouse if we didn’t have such a resourceful and skilled department of one (plus labourer and erstwhile scarecrow) on the job.

And so the week passed, I sieved a couple of buckets of compost, adding a bit of bone meal, organic chicken manure and nettle water as I went, in anticipation of getting some seeds started when the new potting bench became available. We’d also decided to not bother with the Caldbeck potato fair this year, paying a visit to Dobbies, instead, although I think this’ll be a one off, the Caldbeck event’s more “real” and you can get knives sharpened, too! The seed potatoes do look decent though, and I was looking forward to getting the first couple of stitches in the ground at some time in the near future.

I woke on Friday 13th (prescient, as it turned out) and eschewed my little weights routine as I wasn’t feeling too chipper, thinking that I’d maybe overdone it a bit and pulled something in my stomach. The day progressed and I managed a small tin of sardines at lunchtime, but the pain in my stomach continued to worsen. I walked the dog around three, but ended up doubled over the wall outside the pub (this time not from drink). By now I was beginning to think there was something really amiss, so I rang the doctor and was lucky enough to be given an appointment, saving me another visit to the Urgent Treatment Centre. As if the B&M department hadn’t been busy enough, I got him to give me a lift to the doctors, hoping (forlornly as it turned out) that I wouldn’t be seeing the same GP as on recent, all too frequent, visits. Cutting a long story short I was sent, with a letter requesting I be given a scan, to A&E. I’m not going to bore you with the tales, although, as you can imagine, the whole of humanity, in all its starkness, was sharing that waiting room with me. Suffice to say I was in a bed almost exactly twelve hours after I’d arrived, during which time I’d had the scan, given several blood samples, and undergone seven attempts (six failed ones by three different doctors) to fit a double canula. I have a new theory about the NHS, too. At four thirty on any given Friday, everyone in a position of seniority, apart from the odd nurse and the odd world weary receptionist, has gone home and left a bunch of newly qualified doctors to get along as best they, whatever gets thrown at them. The term “disorganised chaos” hardly does it justice.

From a single room, to a four bed on a medical ward and then onto a five bed in a surgical ward took up most of Saturday morning, I was on pain medication and nil by mouth (sips of water only) and there was an idea in place to maybe allow me some “soft food” once I’d stopped vomiting (neither thing happened). I was clearly ill and nobody seemed to really understand what was wrong with me (although this did change). I spent Saturday in bed, sleeping fitfully and listening to the cries of dread and anguish emanating from other rooms on the ward, while various (often failed) attempts to take blood were undertaken as nurses and junior doctors alike reassured me that all would be well (by this point it was assumed that I had a gall bladder problem). Three of the five men on the ward with me had been forced to return to the hospital as they’d had adverse reactions to abdominal surgery, and were in various stages of a second go at recovery. One of them was as dysfunctional a chap as you’re ever likely to meet, but he knew the game and, ill as he was, he played it for all he was worth.

A specialist surgeon was brought in on the Sunday to review the scan and he diagnosed an “impending bowel blockage” which required surgery. He came to see me and explained both best and worst case scenarios (a simple removal of the blockage, or a loss of a section of colon and a resulting STOMA) before asking me to sign on the dotted. I had little choice and eventually went down into surgery at 6pm. Apparently, following my appendectomy (we think in 1999) scar tissue had continued to form in the area of the operation site and had constricted my colon, stopping my bowel from functioning correctly (so much for a stomach strain). The tissue was successfully removed using laparoscopic surgery and I regained consciousness just after 8.30pm. I couldn’t eat for six days in total, during which time I had both a wound drain and a nasal to stomach drain, to forestall vomiting,  I did spend 24 hours on TPN (intravenous “food”) before I started to eat on the Thursday morning and once my bowel was working (the bowel doesn’t like being touched and has a tendency to shut down if it is) I managed to secure discharge at 6pm on Friday the 20th of February.

Once again the NHS proved itself to be the ultimate curates egg, but even given the likelihood that my outcome has been successful and my recovery is going well, it’s hard not to think several things about it, all at the same time.

Is it overstretched? Undoubtedly, but this isn’t, to my mind at least, a lack of funding, it’s more a lack of proper use of resources. Are hospitals in the UK utilitarian? Again I would say so, but more than this, at least where this particular hospital is concerned (it was opened by Blair in 2020 and built under a Brown led PFI initiative) they’re designed with little thought to the real well being of patients or their families. Are the staff to blame? Mostly I’d say not, although some clearly suffer from a form of battle fatigue and some doctors are nowhere near experienced enough to be running busy A&E departments, in the main they remain both cheerful and efficient in the face of much adversity. It isn’t a job I could do, if I’m honest.

All four of the guys who were in the room when I arrived were discharged prior to me and all (apart from one) were happy and relieved to be leaving, they’d all had a tough time but had remained both stoical and friendly throughout our shared “ordeal”. What of the dysfunctional fellow, you may ask? I’ll tell you his story, as he told it to us, without any hint of either shame or regret.  A “recovering” alcoholic and prescription drug addict he worked the staff unmercifully, demanding medication (Lithium, codeine and ora-morph) at every possible opportunity, whether he needed it or not (at one point he had three nicotine patches on his arms, provided by three different nurses) before drifting in and out of (mostly) medication induced consciousness and, when awake, constantly pressing his buzzer on the least pretext, because it was, ultimately, all about him. He ordered everything from the menu at every meal time (the food isn’t great, it’s shipped in daily from a caterer in the Manchester area) before picking through it, eating the bits he fancied and discarding the rest, leaving several plates of food to be thrown away, although puddings, yoghurts and ice creams were consumed with gusto. He left the day before me (reluctantly), driven home by ambulance, his clothes neatly packed for him and with a carrier bag almost brimming over with drugs, returning to a new flat (his old one having been cuckoo-ed by local junkies), where his rent was paid and his benefits, including PIP, were going to be more than enough to keep him in cigarettes, cider and weed until such time as his new life swallows him up, in much the same way as his old life had done and he either returns to a hospital bed, or suffers a fate even worse. I felt for him, in a detached kind of way, but it also crossed my mind that he was more than happy to see the state, including the NHS and the long suffering staff who spent inordinately more time pandering to him than they did seeing to the needs of the other patients, as a right to be taken for granted. Maybe this sense of entitlement, along with the many other issues our society faces, is a big part of the problem? I’m just grateful to be home and (hopefully) fit for the foreseeable future. There are few people that I’d wish this experience on, including my worst enemies. What of the GP? He made the right call, this time, and I truly thank him for that.

Next time we’ll hopefully be boring you with tales of seeds, grandchildren, new windows and structural integrity.
 

© Colin Cross 2026