Another Day, Another Hospital

Zac wakes without a fuss at 4.45am for our next attempt at surgery, in a week that is rapidly falling apart.

This is the last time he’s going to have with his grandparents for a while, and we had thought today would be a day of quiet recuperation after an easy 15-minute op.

Instead, he and I are travelling three hours to the next provincial hospital. His grandparents have been waiting three days for a 24-hour FedEx delivery of brake pads for the car in which they are about to drive across Europe, and are also feeling the strain.

All of us, in fact, have long journeys ahead of us.

I decide not to even think about the practicalities of travelling solo with a post-operative child, and focus on the op itself.

I have a pile of deadlines, AWOL invoices to chase and, I imagine, a mountainous inbox. I try not to think about that either.

Let’s just say this is one of those times when location independence really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s 8.30 when we arrive at the next hospital, a building framed by rusting scaffolding frozen in time by budget cuts, graffiti-ed plywood scarring the common areas, a bustle of Orthodox priests in tall black hats, bushy beards and voluminous robes, and… soldiers…

Lots of soldiers…

There are quite extraordinary numbers of soldiers standing outside.

Huh?

Have there been riots here?

Surely the sit-in isn’t until tomorrow?

What are all these soldiers doing here?

The Paediatric Embarrassing Medical Specialist works on the fourth floor, and the nurses tell me he will be on the ward at 10. We settle down on bus station seats to wait.

And wait.

At 9.45 I pop to the nursing station.

“Wait,” they tell me.

We wait.

This is Zac’s second successive morning on nil by mouth.

I know from the blood tests that he’s having a growth spurt (it’s all about the phosphates, fact fans!), and he needs all the calories he can get.

He stretches his skinny frame across the plastic seats and snoozes.

It’s a nice-looking ward, the Children’s Surgical Ward.

A little tired at the edges, but bright with Winnie the Pooh transfers, Little Mermaids and happy kittens. Lurid curtains and sunny orange paintwork should hurt the eyes but actually lift the spirit.

I’ll be much happier with Zac spending the night here than in the last ward, where the median age was 70.

Though I’d be happier still if we could get the surgery done today.

Still, I figure, beggars can’t be choosers.

And, with a sit-in scheduled for tomorrow, we’ll be lucky if we get this surgery done at all.

The Paediatric Embarrassing Medical Specialist is a lovely chap in his 50s, not that much taller than his patient, with a toothbrush moustache that reminds me irresistibly of a Greek Hercule Poirot, and a brisk concern that is quite phenomenally reassuring.

His English is better than my Greek, but hardly fluent.

“Hello,” I say, brandishing Zac’s records. “We spoke yesterday. My son has…”

“Yes,” he says. “Come.”

I hold a curtain round the bed to screen Zac from the rest of the room as the doctor performs his examination.

“Look,” he says, showing me. “Difficult! Very difficult! No paediatrician? Normally, two years…”

“It’s the same as Greece,” I say defensively, miming the required exam. “Paediatricians check. At birth. At three months. At six months. At two years… At two years, no problem.”

“I will try,” he says. “Tomorrow. Very difficult.”

“Tomorrow?” I say. “Will it be complete? Endaxi?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I need to see what is there.”

He draws me a diagram. “What time?” I ask.

“9 or 10,” he says. “He stays here tonight.”

“Will I need two operations?” Zac asks, later.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. “It depends what he finds when he opens you up.”

This doesn’t feel like minor surgery any longer. Not in the slightest.

We enter, once again, on the admissions merry-go-round. Amazingly, Zac is being processed as an emergency to get the surgery done within our timeframe.

We traipse around a warren of rooms on the first floor, many of them full of soldiers.

There is not a lot of English spoken on this level.

“Grafio?” I say hopefully, miming writing. “Grafis asthenon? Kinesis asthenon? Grafiki? Grafis? To grafio?”

Eventually, a lady works out what I’m on about and sends us down to ground.

In the paediatric emergency room, a babble of Greek, Albanian and, I think, Roma, Zac’s hand is catheterised and yet more blood is taken.

He is weighed, coming in at 32 kilos.

I hand over my EHIC card and get Zac’s yellow slip. There’s much less spare capacity in the administration of this larger hospital than there was in the one down south, which serves a province with a population of barely 200,000 people, and must, in fact, be one of the largest employers in its province.

We go to the hospital shop for junk food. And then we return to the ward.

From the size of the families on the ward – there’s a Roma mother with four small children, only one of whom appears to be sick – it seems that Greek mothers stay on the ward to take over some of the routine nursing care. Which is probably why so few of the younger children cry.

Zac is put in a bright little room with two beds and its own bathroom, and pink curtains with cartoon characters. A nurse makes up a bed with sheets, a pillow and blankets, and dumps a blanket on the vinyl of the other bed.

“I? I hotel? I bed?” I say, in abysmal Greek. I point at each bed in turn. “I bed? Bay bed?”

“No hotel!” she says, followed by a flood of rapid Greek. (Greeks, like Turks, approach the language barrier like Anglophones. If you do not understand something the first time, they repeat it, louder.)

Result!

I’d been envisaging myself finding a hotel in town, staying on the ward as late as I can each evening, then waking up at 4am to be back on the ward. Instead, I’m right here with him. And, no, I don’t care whether I have sheets.

Zac has played well with the kids in my parents’ village across the language barrier, but a solo stay in hospital is a different matter altogether.

Zac beats me at draughts. I beat him at Connect Four. We read.

“I wish they hadn’t put the catheter in my left hand,” he says. “I can barely use the computer.”

Round dinner time, a nurse comes round with a tray, containing one huge chicken breast, half a lemon, soggy rice in a puddle of unsalted water, toast and a plain yoghurt.

Zac picks at the chicken. “Well,” he says, philosophically. “The food has to be really plain so that all the little kids eat it as well.”

I do another run to the shop. Tomorrow will be his third successive day with neither food nor fluids in the morning, and I really want to keep his calorie intake up. And if that means mainlining Twixes and Lemon Fanta, so be it.

We stay up till midnight to ensure he’s hydrated and fall asleep through the wail of the Roma toddler next door.

At 5am, a nurse comes round to take Zac’s temperature. Or, rather, switches all the lights on, and hands me a thermometer to do it.

By 8.30am, surgical preparations are in full swing. Zac’s in a neat, white surgical gown, looking very, very young, and very, very angelic. His surgery should happen before 10.

I emphasise the “should”.

This is, of course, his third morning of nil by mouth, his second time this week in a surgical gown, and a day of planned sit-ins by health service workers across the country.

9.15, and there’s an orderly in our little room, Zac’s on a gurney, we’re in the elevator, and headed, again, for surgery.

The orderly wheels him through the glazed doors.

“How many hour?” I say in rubbish Greek.

“One hour,” says the orderly. “Wait.”

I settle down on the orange plastic seats and try not to stress.

It’s a feat that I manage quite easily during the first hour. Zac’s a healthy eleven-year-old boy, with no allergies, a robust constitution and a high pain threshold, having a rare variation on a fundamentally routine op with an experienced specialist.

He has been X-rayed, weighed, ECG-d and tested to the hilt: the chance of anything going wrong, even under a general anaesthetic, is infinitesimally small.

I repeat this to myself a few times, mantra-style, and pick up my book.

By about 10.25, I’m starting to get antsy. I relocate to the surgery doors, watching men in scrubs coming and going, gurneys transferring from lift to ward…

You can tell, I think, if something’s going wrong in surgery.

Here there’s no urgency in the atmosphere, no haste in the pace. Everything feels routine. Neither too quiet nor too loud.

Which doesn’t stop me worrying, of course.

At 10.40, after he’s been in surgery for an hour and fifteen minutes, I decide it’s OK to grab a passing nurse. “My bay,” I say in abysmal Greek. “Sugary. OK? Sugary what time how many hour OK?”

“The kid?” she says in Greek. “OK! Ten minutes.”

I relax. Everything’s going to be fine. If the surgeon’s taking this long about it, he’ll be doing a good job.

And out Zac comes, on his trolley, with the orderly, whose face looks grave.

There is blood on the sheets and my little boy, my stoical little boy, my little boy who hasn’t cried at injections since he was two, who climbed out of the broken window of a crashed 4×4 without a squeak, who coped with an extraction at an Egyptian dentist without a murmur, is weeping silently with pain.

“I need painkillers, Mum,” he says. “Get me some painkillers. It really hurts.”