Better at Home—without carers twice a day

I’d been an inpatient at Stoke Mandeville Hospital for a procedure performed by a spinal surgeon, Mr Blagg

Cauda equina syndrome is a rare and severe type of spinal stenosis where all of the nerves in the lower back suddenly become severely compressed. . . It requires emergency hospital admission and may require emergency surgery, because the longer it goes untreated, the greater the chance it will lead to permanent paralysis and incontinence.

I’m glad to say that the op has proved a complete success. When I was discharged I found that a hospital bed had been installed in the middle of our very small front room.

I was visited every morning and evening by carers. These documents tell the story:

A couple of times I let them perform a strip-wash in the bathroom, once with a male carer and once with a female. I could do this by myself, and now take a shower every dayI never had much use for them, so we’d engage in conversation. Except in the last few days, they’d stay the full half-hour so it was a bit weird to keep talking all that time. Once I had a ruse “Excuse me, I need the bathroom, might as well shower while I’m there.” I had to reject their offer of coming along in case I fell over.It was a bad idea. When I got back, the bed was made, duvet & blanket inconveniently folded at the foot. The worst was that all my bits and pieces were “tidied” in such as way that it took hours to find everything and put the pieces back in place. Imagine a cleaner tidying up a half-completed game of chess.