Oh dear

Well, it happened just as I feared it would. I presented myself to the hospital this morning, after a preliminary foray yesterday afternoon, to find that no one I’d been corresponding with could be found. First I was given an appointment card for an anaesthetic preassessment clinic, and sent up to the 5th floor. The unfriendly receptionists there sent me off to the anaesthetist’s secretaries office. Those grumpy ladies frowned terribly and sent me off to the sleep clinic.  After wandering around there for a while I went back to the preassessment clinic, snuck past the receptionists and found some anaesthetic nurses. They took me back to the secretaries office, who looked at me with dismay. Eventually they relented and tried to ring the only two anaesthetists I knew the name of here, neither of whom were available. I could tell I was ruining their day so finally agreed to go away and return at some later time. Sounds funny now, but really I can’t imagine any of our lovely staff treating someone like that, even if they spoke funny. Wouldn’t you ring the duty anaesthetist at least? Not a promising start, anyway. Finally in desperation I thought I’d try the interventional radiology department. You don’t need a swipe card to get around the hospital so I had no trouble getting in via the ambulance entrance. The neurological emergencies receptionist was much more helpful, she delivered me to some more secretaries who told me they’d find someone to help me. In the meantime I found a comments book in the waiting room that was full of glowing comments about the interventionalist teams, how they had saved their lives, and how grateful they were. There was even a poem! I’ve never seen anything like it – it was quite heartwarming. Eventually a doctor arrived. After several mangled French sentences he asked me to please speak in English (I’d actually been doing quite well with my French. A friend had once told me that when in doubt, you should just say the English word in a French accent. Oddly enough, this works even better the more complicated the word is). Anyway, this nice young man turned out to be an interventional radiologist (INR) himself. “Oh, did you go to the SLICE conference?” I asked. “Yes”, he said, “I gave a presentation on silicon modeling”. “Oh yes of course!” I said, racking my brain, “that was excellent!”. Anyway, he has my phone number now for any stroke calls at odd hours, and he introduced me to one of the anaesthetists down there, so things are looking up. Now hoping not to spend the next three weeks crying in my room, eating cornflakes out of the packet and watching cat videos on YouTube.