I had said I’d post about the one-year mark since being admitted into hospital. And I will.

I got side-tracked and, to be perfectly honest, a little lost, so I’m writing about that instead. It’s about my brain and my fitness and patterns I’ve found.

It’s a hard thing to write about weaknesses, especially when writing for an (assumed) audience. You don’t want to be self-pitiful in the lows, self-aggrandising in the recovery, naïve or silly. If you think you might do that, you’ll likely not post anything at all, if you can even bring yourself to write it in the first place.

There’s a certain performance to blogging. You’re sharing, but also choosing to do it for yourself, but know you’ll promote it. It seems weird to share stories of hardship for no other reason than to share them. I suppose I hope there’s something in here that will help someone, while I document my experiences for future Conor to look back on.

I’m sitting in the shop after close as I write this. This week has been a bit of a blur. I’ve been on auto pilot and my evenings haven’t amounted to much. (In my current life, that’s a real failure.) I feel like my head has cleared and I can function as normal. So now I write.

It seems strange looking back at the past 5 days (Sun – Thur) and realising an evening hasn’t passed where I haven’t had an anxiety attack. This isn’t something to glamourize. I don’t intend to big-up my triumph over this. After all, I write now because I hope I’m through to the other side for the time being. But this has been very unusual for me. I’ve not felt this powerless for nearly a decade.

Now, I know there will be some people that, as they read this, will say “Why didn’t you call me?”

When the shop closes and the lights go off, I am able to loosen off the mask of the performing businessperson/employer and relax into the exhausted twenty-something that is full of professional and personal doubt, platonic and romantic insecurities, and debt I can’t yet fathom. Really, I have merely the fears of any other person out there, there’s nothing especially frightening about my circumstances. For that reason I couldn’t bring myself to ask for help.

On Sunday last week I fell when I was out running. Not a massive deal, only that I left a chunk of my knee on the pavement and was left with a 2-inch hole across my kneecap. A pretty silly mistake – I had tied my laces, but my shoes are so buckled and old that they require a tighter tie, leaving a lot more lace hanging from my shoe than should be. I stepped on them when I was flying down a slight hill and tumbled at a junction. I had Brexit on my mind because the white van men around me didn’t even look as I dragged myself off the road, but a very friendly middle-eastern dude came and gave me a bunch of plasters and asked me if I was alright.

I couldn’t bend my knee at all, and it took 2 days to scab. I was limping around the shop as I ran out drinks and food, asking my co-workers to sweep up with the dustpan because I couldn’t reach, coming to work with no socks on cause it wasn’t possible to do it myself.

This shouldn’t have been a big deal really. I fell doing box jumps a few weeks ago and got a huge bruise on my thigh, but I could carry on as normal. I was a little proud of that shiner. The thing is, since I couldn’t bend my knee, I couldn’t run, squat, row, jump (and so couldn’t do pull ups either). I thought there was no point going to the gym.

And that doesn’t sound like a big deal either, does it? I’ve gone months in the past without proper and regular exercise. Earlier this year I joined the local CrossFit gym. I went from doing irregular and hodgepodge workouts to doing near daily strength, cardio and technique orientated exercise. My productivity went up, my sleep became deeper and more restful. I craved better food.

There’s a reason people make fun of CrossFitters. Like vegans, like activists, these groups want to share their way of life, their understanding of the world, because they think it is a better way to live. For a while I’ve thought that cardio was the key to balancing out my brain chemistry, which is why running has been my sport of choice. But, living the life I do, there’s a real benefit to being able to wipe myself out in an hour where I just need to turn up do what I’m told. I’ve seen slow progress in my physique, but I feel like I’ve come miles in the movements themselves.

Some anecdotes now:

I remember going through my first breakup and buying an Xbox. I couldn’t deal with the anxiety and self-doubt I was experiencing but had essays to write for my undergrad. I needed something to distract me, but also stimulate my mind. I knew, for financial reasons it wasn’t the best choice. However, for the time and the circumstances it got me through intact. It might sound like justifying an irresponsible spend, but I still revisit it to jump on multiplayer and blow off some steam. It’s not clarity, but it helps.

Back then, I had a 2-day rule. I could go two days without exercise, and on the third I must do something physical. If I didn’t the clouds would roll in behind my eyes and I’d lose myself for a week. A little dramatic, I know.

I believed, and still do, that there’s an imaginary bar that, if you can keep above it, you’ll make good decisions that have good consequences in your life. As you drop closer to the bar you may start to make the odd self-destructive decision, but you still have some autonomy to bring yourself back up and away from it. When you fall below it, you’re in trouble and more often than not you need help to get back above it.

This doesn’t just stand for mental health but just life and energy levels and diet etc.

I remember a day I ate a Double Decker and fell asleep. Sounds quite idyllic looking back at it, having the time to sit about and nap when I wanted. What’s funnier is I woke up and ate another one while watching TV. I fell asleep again.

I made lists of things I should consume when I felt my head dropping. I could feel it coming and knew I had to be proactive in disarming it. I always thought it meant I was missing something. I was desperate to understand my brain and my body so analysed my life for patterns and probably found some weird and wonderful connections that might have meant nothing. I remember a time I was convinced that if I didn’t eat onion my skin would get really spotty. No clue if it’s a thing.

Back to the now:

I know I can be unmanageable when my head drops. I know I can be hard to work with. I’ve never been good at keeping composure. But beyond being proactive, there’s not a lot we can do, is there?

While working 12-hour days, 6 days a week, and whatever is needed on the 7th day, you’re still maxing out well over the regular 40 hour work week that most people do. And in that, there’s no true day off, only a day to catch up. In an environment that you and the decisions you make are scrutinized and vocalised by people that you’ve never met, for no other reason than they happened to be popping by, there’s relatively little you can do but listen and see if you can be persuasive or learn something.

In a customer facing job, where I am representing myself and my business, I must keep composure. I must have gotten a little better at it because people still come for food and coffee.

This past week the door has closed at 5PM and I’ve collapsed onto the floor.

There was an unfortunate clash that brought me down last week, before I had hurt my knee. I suppose some of these things are bound to happen in life. Prompted by this, I had a panic attack and lost my mind for a while; thankfully I was rescued by a friend. I was still able to ask for help at this point, so I must have still been relatively close to the bar.

The trouble was that this clash remained present in some capacity, unresolved. Meaning it was a weight bringing me closer to the bar. Then I hurt my knee meaning I couldn’t exercise so I didn’t have the endorphin and adrenaline burst to lift me away from it. Add the regular financial stress of living and the high maintenance baby boomers that think nothing is worth what you want to charge for it, add a new staff member that isn’t up to the job and constantly fights every attempt at development before deciding they won’t come back one day, add romantic false-starts of modern dating, add the antisocial social networks that catalogue the wonderful life events of people all around you but no where near you, and that’s enough to drag anyone down well below the bar.

I spent evenings in a row in a dark room feeling sorry for myself, ignoring messages from people that love me, ignoring work emails, ignoring my dishes and washing, and was entirely convinced this was the way my life had always been and would be forever.

I remember the theme of community cropped up a lot when I studied Native American Lit in the States. I think it was to do with accountability. People had a responsibility to one another – to help one another and not fuck one another over. It’s that whole idea of the fleet going the pace of the slowest ship, and the slowest ship doing its damndest to go as fast as it can.

The reason CrossFitters want to share CrossFit is because there’s a community built around this shared thing. There’s comradery, accountability, and a shared goal: to understand better our bodies and be better versions of ourselves. (That might just mean to lift heavier things but that’s fair I think.)

Going to the Uni gym or Pure Gym I’ve rarely had a conversation with a stranger.

On Friday I got a text from one of the coaches merely asking how my knee was. That was enough to get me to walk down and say hello after work.

“You gonna do anything tonight?”

I hadn’t thought I would, but after he listed a bunch of things I could do without aggravating my knee I decided I might as well. The gym was empty by the time I started actually doing anything and I had the privacy to be as slow and unplanned as I liked.

I posted a picture that night on my Instagram story. I was topless at the gym and had no other context than to show some bare body. Now, I know what you’re thinking – I was looking for attention. I was. I’ve done it before and will do it again. I like documenting my slow change. But I also felt good about myself.

I had felt the clouds parting as I worked. My lungs were finally breathing oxygen instead of water and I could feel my heart racing. I literally felt this happen in the very moment. It was like a drug. I laughed aloud to myself because I couldn’t believe that the effect would be so noticeable and instantaneous.

The fact is, I had taken myself down to the gym, so maybe I was coming up closer to the bar anyway. It would be interesting to see on a chart the things that had affected me that day, and whether there were some other factors playing into this event.

You’ll maybe think this is an ad for CrossFit. It’s totally not. I’m living an unsustainable lifestyle and the only way to keep going is to go full pelt. I won’t be able to keep it up, but thankfully the shop is performing well so hopefully I’ll be able to pass over some responsibilities to other staff members and work a real work week with some real work/life balance.

To all those that have text me and haven’t heard a peep. I promise I will get back to you. Please be patient with me and don’t give up on me. I’m learning more about myself all the time and I hope I’ll level out as a normal person pretty soon.

In the meantime, you know where to find me…

 

Conor

Yesterday, the 30^th of December and the penultimate day of the year, I made up my New Years resolution.

This isn’t a post so much about the new years resolution itself, because it’s a mundane and yearly thing that I tell myself and forget by March, but rather the arrival at it this time around. To put it in writing compels me to keep it. Should you read this, hold me to it.

Throughout the shop fit, before, and after, and throughout everything business-wise, I have got “I told you so” a lot.

So much so that I don’t care being wrong; I ask questions, I try to avoid problems before they arrive and suss out if there’s going to be a get out clause for the decision I choose. I’m becoming more informed as time goes on, yet its unavoidable.

*

“You need to get more signage, folk can’t tell if it’s a coffee shop.”

“You need more signage, cause folk don’t know if you’re open.”

“You need menus on the wall ‘cause people don’t know what to order.”

“You need to get 2 to 3 social media posts up every day.”

*

A lot of this stuff I have heard before. A lot I’ve agonised over, researched, tried to suss out and organise. It’s not wrong. Unfortunately, it almost always comes down to time and money. (All my previous bosses will laugh at that one, cause I have always been that guy.) If I don’t do it myself there’s the real possibility that something will get damaged. This has happened a few times already, very visibly and irreversibly, and while I want to trust those around me, no one knows this place better than I do, and no one cares about it as much as I do. And the end result is one I have to stick with – they don’t.

“You need more signage cause then…”

I patiently waited for one guy to finish his “doin’ me a learning” before I laid out exactly what all the options were, how much they cost, who I would use to do them, and exactly why I hadn’t yet done so at that point in time. He could tell I was low on patience, and had he been less patronising earlier in the conversation in welcoming me to “adulthood” I might have been more patient with him. I regret not being more friendly; though I don’t know that I’ve stopped a potential customer, I may have ended a potential friendship.

So, when a baby boomer, or child of a baby boomer, told me to sit down at his table after he’d finished, said with quite aggressive body language, I was prepared to be told off by someone who proposed to know better than I; experience told me to put up my defences.

“Take a seat.”

“Was everything okay?”

“Take a seat.” This time he doesn’t make eye contact. I sit. He sits forward like a mafia boss, hands clasped.

“Now, do you want some constructive criticism?”

I’m already sitting so I feel I have consented to whatever this dude wants to say to me. He’s setting the tone, establishing dominance on the young new-business owner. Working in hospitality, I have come to expect older folk to know better than me, whether they’re right or not – they know better.

“Sure.”

“Your coffee is very weak.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Now if I get a cup that size, I expect it to be stronger. It tasted nice, but it was much too weak.” His wife is nodding.

I try to interject at this point, he does not allow me.

“Now, what kind of beans are you using?” It’s almost like he’s problem solving for me at this point.

“What kind of beans?”

“Yes.”

“Like what country? Or, roast or…?”

“Just what beans are you using in your coffee.”

I can kind of tell by the way this guy is talking that he doesn’t know coffee, but he thinks he does. Which means he has to be treated delicately. My thinking at the time – he’s a sensitive boomer who thinks this young upstart has no clue and he’s going to set this kid straight cause business is cut throat and he’s a paying customer so that’s his right.

I’m quite affronted by this, for reasons that will become clear, so I start to get quite anxious by the situation and the injustice of it.

“So, you had the house espresso, which is a seasonal blend-”

“Yeah, but of what beans.”

“So, it’s a blend of X% Capim Branco Brazil, Y% San Antonio Colombia, and Z% Kiandu from Kenya.”

His wife, who has been sitting quietly up ‘til this point, raises her eyebrows and smiles, looking at her husband.

Had I not worked in a coffee roasters for over 2 years I wouldn’t have known that off the cuff. The statement wouldn’t have had half the clout. For someone with as much, though different, experience, they may not have turned this around. That statement set the tone.

“So, this is what we call speciality coffee, third wave coffee. Who named it I couldn’t say, but it’s a point that coffee professionals wanted to maximise flavour of the coffee and get the most out of the beans. This meant working at origin with producers and paying more to incentivize great production. Then, they have to be roasted such that it doesn’t burn the caramels, but still makes the flavours soluble to the water. We’re not looking for deep chocolate bitters and carbon flavours, we’re looking for sweetness and complexity, and everything is done to a recipe. We don’t roast the coffee here, so if you’re issue is just that its not dark roast enough then that’s fair comment and we can’t really compromise on that. But there’s a reason I asked you if you wanted a smaller cup that’s stronger, or a bigger cup that’s weaker. Do you remember me asking you that? You chose a bigger cup which would be weaker.”

His wife nods.

“I didn’t think it would be that weak though.”

“Well it’s a cup almost twice the size and the only difference is that it has more hot water in it. Espresso is made to a recipe down to a 3 second window that we know tastes good. That’s why we serve a long black in a 6oz cup. Do you remember I offered you batched filter too?”

He nods.

“Well, batch filter is a big pot of coffee which is made to the same strength for the whole litre. If you have a big cup it’s the same strength as a little cup. The only thing was that you’d have had to wait on it brewing because we had just finished it. Do you remember me offering you that?”

He nods.

“Let me get you one the way I’d serve it.”

I come back with an espresso cup with a single espresso in it, topped up with hot water. I’m not giving the guy a full long black on the house, that would be preposterous. This is his problem.

“Try that.”

Given all the people who have done me a learning throughout my short and hectic business life, it would have been easy to lose my cool and lose the customer in the process.

“That’s lovely.”

“That’s how I’d like to serve you it. The thing is people often want more of something rather than the best of something. And who am I to tell them otherwise. I can only do my best to guide you to the best version of what I can offer. And I’m lucky we’re not hugely busy at the moment, because it meant I’m able to have this conversation with you. Were we busy, you wouldn’t have got that, and you probably wouldn’t come back.”

The thing was, he didn’t realise I had put some thinking behind it, and didn’t understand that his choice affected the drink, mostly because that same choice doesn’t have nearly as much of a bearing on his drink elsewhere. Chains have taught us that you can get any size of any drink, but when we make espresso to a recipe that suits that coffee, it changes all the drinks too. We can’t pull 3 double espressos for your 16oz flat white, we’re just not going to do it. And honestly, you shouldn’t want that either. You’d probably shit yourself.

“Some places you go,” he says, “the baristas put the coffee (portafilter) on the machine (group head) and walk away and do something else and then come back and hit the button, and they burn the coffee.”

This didn’t have much to do with what we were talking about at the time, but what I think he wanted to show me was that he noticed, and he cared. He felt that what he was served was an injustice and some upstart was touting snobby coffee that was shit.

I explained that you can’t really burn coffee that’s been roasted beyond 200 Celsius with 95 degree water, but what he had caught onto was that the baristas didn’t follow a recipe, and that they weren’t really trained to a very high standard – potentially. In any case, that it was a shame he was being served bad coffee, and had to just roll over and accept it.

“Everything we do is to a recipe. That’s why we don’t have a big food menu, its why we don’t over advertise. We want everything we do to be of the same standard, something we’re proud of. And when we are a little more ready, and have a little more to offer, we’ll really shout about it. In the mean time, we’re able to talk, much like we’re doing now, and get loads of feedback.”

Before this man left he shook my hand and thanked me. He may well turn into a walking advertisement for this business due to the positive nature of the conclusion.

If coffee is a part of culture the way everything else is – built with expectations, a language, and etiquette – then it only reminds me that when it comes to anything political (not governmental but affecting people and people-opinions) we absolutely must be patient. In such divisive times, of binary votes and misinformation, we can not afford to take a tantrum and walk away. If we don’t know, we only ask. If we do know, we pick our battles, and if we choose to battle, we never give up the high ground. We are persuasive rather than savvy. And rather than kicking the other off their illusion of a high ground, invite them up to yours for a cup of coffee and a chat.

Here’s to 2019.

This year has been a roller-coaster with a lot going on. So here’s the health chapter.

TLDR: I’m okay now – or rather we haven’t been given reason to think otherwise. This is quite a long read. It is a story and I think some people were scared to ask. Read at your leisure.

In January, I went on a ski holiday – which I booked super-last minute – with some friends while we were out drinking. They had already booked it, and there was space for one more. I though, Why not? I called it my last holiday ever; I was only half joking.

On day three I dislocated my shoulder and stuck myself at the resort the rest of our stay. There was not a single thing to do there. Other than drink I suppose. I shelled out like 500£ for French healthcare. Boo.

So, all my life I’ve never suffered a broken bone or serious illness and here I am laughing cause of all the money I wasted on a last minute holiday I was never supposed to go on. There was a novelty in it, despite the inconvenience of it.

If you’ve never dislocated your shoulder, it isn’t a pleasant time. I won’t go into extreme detail, but your arm becomes quite weak, and if you’re a daredevil like me, you’ll try it out the sling (cause you have to wear a sling) too early and feel the muscles start to give out if you turn it the right way (or the wrong way I suppose). It needs quite a lot of time to heal, then that same amount of time again for physio. If, like me, you work in hospitality, there’s not a lot you can do with one arm. #zerohourscontracts

Anyway, flash forward to June.

I’ve not long got the keys to a shop in Stirling intent on making it into a little neighbourhood coffee shop. I’ve organised a skip, skip permit, and helping hands to gut and empty the place. It was an Opticians, one which the previous tenants near enough just locked the door and never came back. So there was a lot – I can not stress how much there was – of stuff to throw out.

At the start of the week, I start to have wisdom tooth teething pains. Nothing I can’t deal with, cause I have had my top teeth through without an issue. I put my head down and get on. I’m taking painkillers to give myself respite, while we’re emptying the shop. As the week progresses I take more and more pills, and my quantity/quality sleep becomes less and less. I wake up in pain, and sit like a zombie with Always Sunny playing as a distraction. The week ends. We have thrown out 4 skips worth of material. It’s time to knuckle down and transform this place.

I tell my dad I’m going for a nap, I didn’t sleep well the night before, and he’s going to wait for the guy collecting the final skip.

There’s not a lot I remember about the rest of that day. I had taken an opiate painkiller to try get on top of the pain – a french packet of pills from when I dislocated my shoulder about 5 months earlier.

I was conscious for what came next but I don’t remember it.

My mum and my dad had crossed paths at my flat, as my dad was leaving and my mum was arriving to meet me. They agreed they should put me in the car and take me back to my mums so she could keep an eye on me. We decided that it was time to go to the dentist.

So, my lower wisdom teeth are impacted. The pain I was experiencing on my right side, like chiselling, the dentist says is caused by infection. He gives me antibiotics and refers me for an extraction which could take up to 6 weeks.

During all this chat, I laugh inwardly that the word for brewing coffee and the surgery I’m so desperate for are the same.

At this stage I’m taking co codamol, then ibuprofen two hours after that, then co codamol 2 hours after that, and so on until I can’t take anymore. I’ve got dihydrocodeine as back up but it does absolutely nothing for me. The prospect of not really sleeping for 6 weeks is pretty horrid. Eating isn’t even a passing worry, I’m not hungry.

When I have had my quota of painkillers I’m writhing in pain. Like, full on twisting and turning, clenching and groaning, I’m not crying but I feel that self pity that I’m almost ready to start pulling teeth myself. Once or twice I tried to wedge things inbetween my teeth to relieve the pressure I’m feeling along my jaw. It’s like my teeth are all being pressed together in a vice, and my jaw bone is the collateral to their movement. I’ve never felt so sorry for myself.

I’m lucky because my mum works in the hospital to which I was referred. She knew who to ask and what to do. I managed to get an emergency extraction a few days later.

Relief.

This is only the start of this story.

So when I meet the dental surgeon he’s so confident and charming that I of course defer to his judgement on all things dental. He’s the one with the training and years of experience. There’s just something a little off in the way he keeps telling me I’m “just teething” when I haven’t slept in nearly 2 weeks.

He gives me a local and sends me home to get some sleep, but the local wears off and I’m still unable to sleep. All it really does is let me shift my codeine to later in the day… Yippee.

The next day I come back and they take the tooth out which, by the way, is horrific. They near enough climb on top of you and use a dental crowbar to wedge the damn thing out. He gives me a pack of antibiotics and says I should take them “if you feel you need to.” Meanwhile, he’s told me to stop taking the antibiotics my dentist issued. This is probably an important detail.

So it’s out. As I said before. Utter relief. I sleep better than I’ve slept in weeks. It’s still sore, I still take painkillers, but this is nothing by comparison. I feel like I can function again. I try to set stuff up for the shop, get work moving etc.

A week passes.

The wound has tried really hard to heal but seems to be struggling. I get on with it, clean it as best I can. I’m going through mouthwash like its my new vice.

Another week passes.

The gum around my premolar 5 has swelled up and I’m not sure why. The extraction site is still pretty messy, and now my premolar is wobbling. I start taking those antibiotics, for lack of a better idea.

I call the dental surgeons, asking if they offer anything much by the way of aftercare. They say yes of course. Can I come in today?

“It’s just a bit of gum disease,” the dental surgeon says. “You need to brush better.”

He tells me to come back in a week.

I brush so hard I brush a hole in my swollen gum. When the 5 days of amoxicillin has run out, the hole I’ve brushed in my gum has started to weep pus.

So I go back to the dental surgeons. I’m seen by another person. She thinks I’m a new arrival and starts making me fill out forms. I comply, trying to explain the situation. She begrudgingly accepts, probably thinking someone should have shared that information with her. She’s rough on my face, like really rough. Wobbles the tooth til my eyes are leaking. She doesn’t know what to do; say’s I should see a hygienist. “We just take stuff out,” she says. While we’re waiting on another opinion, she decides to send me for an x-ray.

It’s quite hard to get an x-ray of your premolar 5’s roots FYI – especially when everything’s swollen AF. I have massive pieces of plastic wedged into my mouth while they point the x-ray at me, saying “Stay still” and run off to hit the button before something moves out of place. I kept a stern composure, but honestly it was traumatic. They made 3 attempts. Imagine your site of surgery and infection being battered with hands and tools for a solid half hour.

The first surgeon comes back into the picture. He looks at the x-ray and says there’s no sign of infection. Pokes and prods the gum until all that comes out is blood. He’s happy about that. I just need to see a hygienist. He discharges me back to my dentist.

My dentist sees me the next day and takes one look at my warzone of a mouth and near enough swears under his breath. “We’re going to hammer this,” he says and writes a prescription for doubled up antibiotics amoxicillin and metronidazole. It’s a weeks worth of pills so we make an appointment for the following week.

A week passes and the pus is still all over the premolar and extraction site. He says we’ll give it another week and writes another prescription.

Honestly, it started to shift it, I thought, at the time. But another week passed and it wasn’t healed. The wobbly tooth has started to firm up though, which is a first for a long time. That’s an improvement, right? So surely we’re heading in the right direction, I say.

The dentist doesn’t look convinced. Calls his colleague in for another opinion. They agree.

“This is beyond our capabilities. You’ll need something stronger that we can’t prescribe.”

He refers me back to the MaxFacs clinic and writes a prescription for 2 weeks worth of double the dose of the previous prescription and says bye with “good luck”.

Whatever he wrote in his referral shook things up that’s for sure, because I wasn’t seen by the other dental surgeons but rather a group of consultants. The type that have climbed so high they get called “Mr” again rather than “Dr”. They say it’s likely the infection has penetrated the bone, which is why the oral antibiotics haven’t cleared it. Bone has a very restricted blood supply, so they need intravenous antibiotics, and a lot of them, to get on top of it. They’re talking about a CT scan, but other than that they don’t give much away.

I see them again the next day and try to get some info out about the way my case was handled, and this guy gives nothing away. He’s closed ranks, and we sit in the room in an uncomfortable silence. I ask something to the effect of “what are we waiting on?” and he replies, “We’re just away to see if there’s a bed.”

It’s Friday, and I’m admitted to a ward. Everyone goes home and I’m there for the weekend. I’m perfectly able, but I have to hang about in this bed until my daily IV. Not only a total waste of my time and theirs, but a total waste of NHS money. They say I can get off the ward during the day, so a few times I took them up on that. Being in the ward means I have faster access to treatment. Clearly I need it. I don’t think I wholly understand the gravity of it.

Monday comes around the the place is manic. I’m taken for a CT scan, fitted for a PICC line, taken for an x-ray, and seen by the consultants and the infectious diseases and OPAT team.

PICC lines are something to behold. It’s a catheter that runs from your bicep all the way up your arm and drops down into your chest. The guy that put it in was a pro; i barely felt a thing. A bunch of Stirling Uni student nurses are kicking about the hospital during my stay, so there’s some familiarity. One girl is watching the placement of my PICC and so the surgeon – in intensive care I’ll add – is talking through the process. He has to tell me the things that might go wrong, like the line going up into my neck; I have to turn my chin into my shoulder to try stop that happening. “There’ll be some blood here, but that’s normal.” I close my eyes cause I’ve had so much intrusive stuff happen to me that I decide I can do without this. After he’s finished I do look and damn – there was a lot of blood.

Until the x-ray comes back they can’t use the PICC for the IV cause if its in the wrong place then they could shoot your brain full of antibiotics – or something like that. In the mean time I’m stuck with the cannula, which hurts to high hell for some reason. No one else is bothered but I feel like my arms being blown up by a bike pump.

I’m told I’m going for surgery to debride my jaw. I’m told there’s a chance I’ll lose my back 3 teeth. I’m devastated. In the mean time I have to hold out and stick around the ward. The plan is to open my gum and clean out the jaw bone of any infected tissue and stitch me up again, keep me on the IV and oral antibiotics for 6 weeks, and hope to see signs of remodelling in the bone after that time. It’s great to hear there’s a plan for me, but the 6 week timeline isn’t something I can make an awful lot of sense in my mind. The doctors can’t speak with certainty in anything for fear of being held to account, and so their noncommittal language is anxiety inducing too.

The day of the surgery comes and I’m put into a gown and taken down in my bed. It’s funny, cause I can walk and I’m being pushed around like a toddler. The surgery is under general anaesthetic so I’m prepped for all that. I’ve holes up and down my arms from cannulas. I’ve been under general 2 times before this, and this is the only time it was pleasant. It feels like rest.

I wake up and the first thing I do is tongue my teeth. Or rather, the gap.

It seems like a silly thing to be upset about, because I only lost one tooth. But the feeling I had was failure. I had done everything I could to try and aid this situation, and the outcome was still this. I had given up every detail and symptom, had the timeline to a T, and still…

I fell out with a nurse that night. I was probably short with her, however I maintain that if she wants to put some drug inside my body, I should have the information to agree, not just blindly accept. “You can refuse it if you want,” she says, and I try to explain that I just want to understand. She doesn’t like that and so I tell her to piss off. I’m not proud of that. Her colleague explains it to me that the blood thinner is for patients that are bed bound and this is an effort to avoid clots in their legs post-op. I say “my mouth is full of blood and stitches, why would I take a blood thinner when I’m up and able?” She shrugs and says “you’ll be out tomorrow.”

For the next 3 or so weeks I was making daily trips to the hospital for the IV antibiotics, which was a bit of a bind, however it meant I had a little more freedom. After meeting with the leader of OPAT I was put on high strength orals instead, giving me back the ability to work uninterrupted for the last while. Antibiotics are tough on the body, especially at this strength. The IV just made me tired AF, and the orals mess your gut up so much you never quite know if you’re going to have lactose-intolerance and IBS for the rest of your days.

The 6 week mark came around and I had my CT scan.

“There has been marginal signs of  bone remodelling.”

Nothing happens quickly in recovery, but damn does it go wrong quickly. That was the sign that nothing was stopping healing taking place; essentially, that infection wasn’t present – ish.

I had my first beer in near enough 9 weeks and didn’t make a big deal of it at the time. I wanted some normality. I can’t imagine a life with chronic illness. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that I love healthcare, and I’m so glad that I can contribute to a service that helps people the way it helped me.

I do however criticise openly the pathways that lead me back to my dentist and landed me in a bed so long after symptoms were present. I can’t comment on whether it was the “correct” protocol. But I can say that if the dentist said “Lets hammer this”, while the surgeon said “you need to brush better” something doesn’t add up. I was put on antibiotics by healthcare professionals 4 weeks after my extraction; during this time I took the amoxicillin the surgeon gave me, though there were unspecified instructions. I told him it didn’t shift the symptoms. Corrective action could have been made a great deal earlier. It would have saved us all time and money. Maybe the outcome would have been the same. Best not be bitter.

Anyway. I’m okay. My mouth actually looks healthy again, even though I look like I’ve been in a few brawls. There’s no reason to think that there’s any infection present, but now and again I get little aches and pains that makes the hair on the pack of my neck stand up. We often learn from things going wrong, and usually it’s just an anxious feeling saying “What’s this I don’t like this.”

Anyway.

Back to the rest. Back to work.

Coffee shop is coming soon. Follow @hbwcoffee on Instagram