I woke up early, around 7 or so, and dragged myself and my IV stand out to the nurses’ station to borrow their phone. I called Ash again to tell her about the operation, and then broke the news to my understandably incredulous Dad. I crept back to bed.

The anaesthetist (no name again, I’m afraid) came in to ask about drug allergies and to explain what they were going to do to put me under, and then a little while later the consultant—Mr Oliver—arrived with a gaggle of interns. He explained the operation in pretty much the same terms as Mr Woods, the A&E surgeon, had done so, but with added joviality and an amiable playing-to-the-crowd manner. I bantered politely about PACS and the like and then concentrated on breathing shallowly and gritting my teeth until they came to take me away.

Around 9am (probably; my sense of time from the morning before the operation until about Saturday afternoon is muddied from the discomfort and the anaesthetic), a porter arrived to wheel me down to the theatre. A student nurse, who had earlier asked if she could sit in on the operation, came along with us. I watched the ceiling lights pass by overhead.

For the first time since I’d arrived, I was starting to worry about the outcome of the operation. I babbled away about this to the porter and the nurse, stating my concerns that:

  • They might chop my arm off;
  • They might sever a nerve and leave my arm dangling like a fish on a line;
  • I might get an infection;

and so on. The porter was sphinx-like in his concern. The student nurse reassured me enough to quiet me down by the time we reached the anaesthetic room, a sort of antechamber to the operating theatre. The same anaesthetist was there again and started talking to me, presumably to gauge my alertness, while I stared fixedly at the ceiling and tried to ignore the scratch of a bigger-bore cannula being inserted into a vein in my left hand. A second (senior?) anaesthetist told me they were going to put a ‘block’ into my neck to stop movement of the arm, and asked me what I did for a living. (I found out later that they usually ask people to count down from 10 to judge when they go under, but apparently I was so forthcoming on the subject of medical imaging software that they thought that would do instead. I suspect they were glad when I finally conked out.) I felt another scratch in my neck, but they must already have given me something because the feeling was quite dull—

—and then I swam back to consciousness. I appeared to be back in the ward, and my brain gradually reassembled itself from its constituent parts. Ash was there, sitting by the side of the bed (what a sight for sore eyes!) and my Dad was at the bottom of it. There must have been some mistake, because they’d replaced my arm with that of a morbidly obese person, then wrapped it in a bandage from wrist to upper arm.

I had no recollection of anything after the second anaesthetist had asked me about my job, and more weirdly no sense of a passing of time since then either. I remember working on a virtual colonoscopy project a few years ago, and it was explained to us that a traditional colonoscopy—involving the insertion of an endoscope where the sun don’t shine—is so painful that the patient is given an ante- and retrograde amnesiac drug to prevent them from remembering anything before, during or after the procedure. It isn’t uncommon to hear screams coming from the room in which the colonoscopy is carried out, but afterwards the patient emerges blissfully unaware of all that has passed, so to speak, except with a marked discomfort when sitting down. I wondered if they’d given me similar drugs.

The consultant came back in to explain how the operation had gone. Woozy as I was, I don’t remember a great deal about what he told me, except that I retain the distinct feeling that he was particularly pleased with how awesomely they’d managed to put my arm back together. In hindsight, I’m slightly surprised that he decided to carry out his debriefing while I was still flying the friendly skies on the wings of a general anaesthetic.

From this point on, my memory of Friday is mostly informed by other people. My attention came and went, and I don’t recall things happening in any particular order. My Dad picked up my Mum, coming back from a holiday with some friends, and she came in to fuss over me in the early afternoon. The night though, is lodged quite firmly in my memory.

I was hooked up to a self-administered morphine drip where I could trigger a dose every 5 minutes at most. For some reason (possibly because the anaesthetic was still in my system; possibly some misguided stoicism from the night before), I’d made the decision to stay off it. Around 4pm my resolve crumbled and I hit the button. It didn’t numb the pain, but it did make it easier to deal with, and I used it intermittently until the lights went out and I tried to fall asleep. The thing was, I’d been on an IV saline drip since the night before, and after the operation had knocked back about a gallon of water to compensate for the pre-op ban on fluids. I was massively bloated, and there was no way in hell I could make it to the toilet.

I hit the button to ask for help from a nurse about midnight or so, and Mohammed the staff nurse pulled the curtains around my bed and helped me onto a commode beside it.

I couldn’t pee. I couldn’t crap. Morphine causes quite severe constipation, it turns out. It also causes nausea if you’ve taken a lot of it, and I had. I spent about two and a half hours on that commode in the most wretched night of my life, straining to pass some—any—urine and vomiting regularly into these upturned cardboard trilby hats they give you to be sick in. I filled four of them with a watery, whiteish liquid and was eventually persuaded back to bed (I was in no danger of wetting it, I can assure you) by another nurse about 2 or 3 am. I slept fitfully.