A tattoo, or two

If you mention bed baths to anyone who has never been in hospital you get a fairly predictable response about how it must be brilliant. It's really not, and for any number of reasons. FIrst off it's not quite as glamorous as people imagine especially when it's being provided by an 18 stone man called Dave (even if he actually does a fine job).

The main problem I had with them is that they just don't actually make you feel clean. A slight washing down with hot soapy water is grand and all but unless you actually rinse the soap off well then it feels like you have a layer of the stuff building up and building up over time. Not being able to articulate this admittedly minor annoyance would eventually bother me greatly. I'm sure I'm not alone on that front.

By this stage dignity wasn't a concern for me but I did like how how much effort the nursing staff went to in making sure that you weren't uncomfortable, although I did find the massive range of euphemisms for your groin utterly baffling. I preferred it when they were just matter of fact about it and didn't make a big deal out of the fact they were giving your genitals a scrub. In fact most would ask if you wanted to do it yourself, which was a nice touch (if you'll excuse the turn of phrase), but I was of the opinion that they could see everything and reach everything without pulling at tubes and wires so would just leave them to it.

At the point immediately post operation I was particularly bad at laying on either side, especially the right side. For some reason doing so would lead to my oxygen saturation plummeting and I would start really struggling for breath, which would freak me out completely. After a while we realised if I had to roll for any reason then I would get an oxygen boost prior to even starting off. At first this was definitely a physiological response but I've often wondered if it then became psychological.

Anyway, the point of all this chat is to highlight that a lot of the time I was rolled over to have my back cleaned it would evoke some comment about the tattoos on my back. Apparently I don't look like someone who would have any never mind the massive ones that cover my back. I can't say I understand fully what that means. I don't know what someone that has tattoos looks like, if you know what I mean.

I have quite a few of them now and they are very personal. Even the couple that are just about visible are pretty discreet. I like to think they tell a story about the person I am and I've decided I'm going to share that with you. Now thi may well be as tedious as hearing about someone else's dreams so don't feel you have to read on from this point but don't say I didn't give you ample warning about the oncoming stream of bollocks.

I can't quite explain why I wanted my first one; only that I knew that I did want one. I decided early on that if I came up with an idea I would keep that idea for about 6 months and then if I still liked it I would go ahead and get it done. I was reading my favourite comic strip when it finally leapt out at me and I thought it was perfect. It was my favourite frame from my favourite Sunday strip of Calvin and Hobbes. It's actually Calvin and Hobbes dancing to classical music at 78 rpm. I love the whole strip (all 21 pnels of it) but this one alone was just perfect. and so right in the middle of my final exams for Uni I tooko a break from studying and went to a tattoo parlour just off Byres Road in Glasgow and got my first tattoo on my left thigh, where I wouldn't have to explain it away to my parents. As acts of rebellion go it was quite meek really.

It's been there nearly 20 years now and I kind of forget it's there and then I'll be sitting in the shower and spot it and it still makes me laugh. I'm sure it seems utterly frivolous and ridiculous to most but I love it still. In all my time in Newcastle only 3 people recognised what it actually was (most thought it was Tigger) but my favourite of the doctors actually has them as his avatar on Facebook so recognised it straight away. Little things like this pleased me immensely.

The second one I had done when living in Cardiff under the notion that as a Scot living in Wales something Celtic would be perfect so I went for a cross in the middle of my back. I took my time choosing which particular one I wanted. It was originally black with blue colouring but after radiotherapy had made it fade dramatically I got it totally redone and had the colour changed to green. The guy who done this told me that it had distended because of my rapid weight gain and loss from my steroid regime and so he tried putting a shadow on it to make it look better but it was never quite right and so I let it annoy me for years before finally deciding to do something about it, more of which later.

It genuinely was brilliant when it was first done - it was done at the tattoo parlour that all the Welsh rugby team got theirs done (I moved down there the very month the Rugby World Cup was held there) - it was only messed up by ridiculous swings in weight pulling at my skin. It was probably never really even that bad but it was enough to niggle at me apparently.

The next one I got was just above it, across my shoulders. I wanted something in red because I was living in Aberdeen (that being the football team colours) and to vaguely represent a Phoenix as I felt my new life up there post bone marrow transplant was enough of a second chance to merit the use of such an idea. I truly hd risen from the flames, in my head at least. It takes a bit of imagination as it looks like a normal tribal piece really but to me it looked like an abstract idea of a phoenix. I would later find out my cousin Stephen has almost the exact same tattoo, except in black. That's what can happen when you get one done from an existing design on a wall of a parlour I suppose.

It was another few years before I got another one and it was actually prompted by my friend in Belfast Celine wanting to get one as memory of her time there. She wanted a Celtic band round her wrist with a claddagh in the centre of it. I got thinking to what I would  want to memorialise my time there and the thing I came up with was something that I had kind of wanted to get for a while anyway but seemed appropriate for a place where the police are held with such mistrust.

You see my favourite full on comic book (as compared to a comic strip) is called the Watchmen by Alan Moore. At the very last page of the book it simply says Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, which is Latin for 'Who watches the watchmen?', a line taken from Juvenal's satires. Should you care about such things the answer is that it is actually us, the people, who are meant to keep the aforementioned watchmen in check - not the coastguard as Homer Simpson would maybe suggest.

Here they both are immediately after they got done - mine being the pasty coloured skin obviously. Here's the writing in a bit more detail.

Now I know that Latin techinically doesn't need the question mark but I thought it looked better so it went on as I thought otherwise it wouldn't be obvious where it begins and ends.

Having had one done in Glasgow, Cardiff, Aberdeen and Belfast I was considering what I would get to mark my time in Liverpool when real life got a bit in the way and my hospitalisation and eventual move home meant that I wasn't nearly well enough to even consider getting another one done. Then a couple of years ago I caught sight of the cross on my back in the mirror and it just annoyed me one time too many. I sought out a tattooist who could come up with an idea for either covering it up or lasering it off. What we came up with was something approaching compromise as the position and size of it meant that completely covering it would be difficult so I had a series of laser sessions to get it to fade again and then we'd work on top of it. This time instead of being abstract I wanted a proper phoenix, and it was going to be pretty big. It took quite a few sessions but this is what we ended up with.

Now the cross is just about visible still underneath the head of the bird but the real focus I hope is on the main event itself. It is the work of Tim Sandys, whose conversations while he is sticking needles into my skin have been as important to me as the work he's doing. You know you're in pretty capable hands when the person tattooing you also teaches at the Art School. I love it obviously but this is the one that garners the most comments from nursing staff, as they quite simply don't expect to see that on my back when they roll me over.

Just when we were doing that I had a further notion of something I wanted done. There is a line of Nietzschean philosophy that seemed to be appearing in almost everything I was reading for a time. One of the things I had read it in was my old mate from my time in Aberdeen Gavin's degree dissertation, when he asked me (and my then girlfriend Katherine - his best pal) to proofread it for him. It comes from the book Beyond Good and Evil and it is something I've always absolutely loved so I thought I'd get it done in memory of him - the  poor fella died a few years previously. I'm sure it will be familiar to you when you read it. Or at least the latter part will.

Without wanting to sound too pompous I have always held great stock in the first line, especially when I was fighting various diseases at different times. To not let myself yield to becoming bitter about the experience was massively important to me, and I think I've just about achieved that. I've also gazed into the abyss a few times and found out quite a lot about myself as a person in the process.

The back pieces were finished just in time for me getting the call for the lung transplant (in fact I missed my final appointment to check to see if any touch up work was needed on the Phoenix) so obviously nothing got done for a wee while but while lying in my bed my mind was racing with ideas as to how I wanted to mark this massive event in my life in tattoo form. 

I had a lot of scar tissue that I was particularly keen on covering up as well as I could as the chest drains were generally thrust in without much care for aesthetics. There isn't much I can do about the main clam shell scar, and nor would I want to really, but these smaller ones were just annoying and so just had to go.

I knew fairly on that I wanted something relating to a Chimera, the creature from Greek mythology that was made up of 3 animals, specifically because I now had 3 types of DNA that make up me now. In the original idea the Chimera has teh body of a lion, with an extra head of a goat and its tail being a snake. I knew I didn't want some graphic realisation of that and I stumbled across an idea that finally led to a crest with 3 heads. They're not exactly lion, goat and snake but are certainly close to that theme. Both Tim and I felt that when you're dealing with mythology you don't need to be absolutely exact anyway. And so this is what came of it

I didn't just want one moob to have a tattoo on it and so was thinking about what else to have on my left side to balance things out. I wanted to continue on the DNA theme but felt like the double helix was perhaps a bit on the obvious side, especially as I already have that on the ring that I bought a couple of years ago. A bit of lateral thinking took me back to my original degree and the x-ray crystallography image that allowed Rosalind Franklin to work out the structure of DNA in the first place. As Nobel prizes aren't awarded posthumously Franklin is often overlooked for her role in things in favour of Watson and Crick because she went and bloody died before the prize was awarded in recognition for the work in elucidating the structure. That I got it done on International Women's Day was also pretty perfect.

And finally, we get to a little bit of history. When Charles I was being held in the Tower of London awaiting execution he was going through the collected works of Shakespeare and embedded within one of the pages is the Latin phrase 'Dum Spiro Spero', which roughly translates as 'While I breathe, I hope'. Now if ever there was a motto that completely captures my life it is that, and so I thought that having a pair of Latin wrists would be just tremendous. I got this done yesterday just after a morning when I was in the hospital getting SPIROmetry tests done, so the universe was just aligning as far as I'm concerned.

 

Obviously this is a much shorter piece of text so I let Tim just put a wee embellishment to join the two parts together.

So there you go. A cartoon strip mixed in with some German philosophy, some Greek mythology and a bunch of Latin thrown in for good measure. High art and low art for all that such things matter.

That lots of my friends don't really understand my having them has never really bothered me. That they make sense to me genuinely is all that matters and that each time I see them I really do get joy from not only the pieces themselves but the memory of getting them done and where I was at the relevant point in my life. And even more than that recently, I have been getting them done by someone who has really got my brain motoring at a time when it wasn't necessarily functioning at its best. Cheers for that Tim.

Drying up in conversation you'll be the one who cannot talk

I've been putting this off for long enough because I haven't really got my head around it as a subject on the whole but I think we know each other well enough now that you'll cut me a little slack if I start wittering on.

I'm going back to the immediate period post transplant you see and things back then were a bit of a muddle in my mind. I was still hallucinating at times but there weren't quite as many horrific nights alone with my thoughts and staring at the ceiling counting the minutes through the medium of a pulsing ventilator. Retaining sanity through that period is actually one of the greatest accomplishments of all my time in hospital.

I mentioned in the last post about this period about the tracheostomy going in to help me but I never went into the specifics. The hole in your throat is a little under the voice box and there is a cuff that is inflated in the windpipe that effectively creates a seal there, meaning the oxygen from the ventilator all goes to the lungs and none escapes up the way and out. This cuff being below the voicebox means that no air goes over your vocal chords and so you cannot speak. Such a seal also meant that I couldn't take anything to eat or drink as it couldn't (theoretically at least) get past the cuff. This meant the insertion of a naso-gastric (NG) tube to feed me. Being fed this liquid fat directly into your stomach does give you the adequate nutritional cover but I would learn to seriously miss eating and drinking. Initially I was fine with all this though as I was sure it would only be a very short term measure until we could wean me off the ventilator. By this stage though I knew that our worries about me being a difficult patient were starting to come to pass.

Most patients only spend a very short time in Intensive Care before being moved up to the transplant ward and they progress from there. Complication after complication for me meant that I was stuck in ICU for as long as I was on the ventilator. The chronology of this is a bit on the difficult side to pin down in my head and the same applies for the family as it was a whole lot of stuff happening in a short time so recalling it now, even with Janine's updates as prompts, is difficult. I think I've got this little bit sorted in my head though. The first mishap that required a proper intervention was that one of my lungs was herniating slightly and pushing through gaps in the ribs. Prior to transplant you have to match all sorts of things and there is a slight tendency to overlook just how important the size and shape of the donor lungs and chest cavity of the recipient are in relation to each other. Now I have an unusually large chest cavity for such a short arse but even then inflammation of the donor lungs was causing them to literally push through my ribs so this required a trip back to the operating theatre. All things considered it isn't the biggest deal but it definitely needed addressing and unfortunately fixing that led to an issue that would dominate the next few weeks. Despite fixing that issue I came back from theatre and rapidly started showing signs of what they call surgical emphysema. I had the trademark crackling sensation on my chest when even the slightest compressions were made. My chest actually inflated by quite a considerable distance in that period. It was really weird to look down and see it so puffed out. This meant more medication that I can't really remember allied to more chest drains to try and clear it up. This, as I said, was not a rapid process.

While it was clearing though we could very slowly, and without any massive steps, start to reduce the settings on the ventilator. We actually at that point, with obvious hope in our hearts, changed the type of ventilator to one that was a bit more portable and would allow me to start doing more than just moving from bed to chair and back. We were thinking about a few paces at some point in the future. 

By this stage I had spent about 7 years with only the ability to walk short distances thanks to muscle atrophy (hence the extensive, and progressive use of the wheelchair in that period) so the idea that I was going to start on the road to recovery on that front was simply thrilling. I knew it wasn't going to be easy but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a solitary step and all that.

I've mentioned me getting from the bed to the chair as being my main physio on any given day but I haven't gone into what an undertaking that actually was. The logistics of it were incredible just in terms of the number of lines and bits of tubing that I was dependent on. making sure that these could reach their designated connections at all points during the transfer was a proper two person job. Thankfully in ICU you have the one on one nursing and the physio to try and do it all but if it weren't so important to make sure it all stays in the correct place it would actually be quite comical to watch. And all that for the sake of an hour because I had a plug up my hole and would need back into bed where we would do it all again, only backwards. The only bit I used to get a bit worried by was the very short time they would disconnect the ventilator so they could switch sides to make the tubing reach. That was nerve wracking for a little while. I only had to use the ceiling hoist to move me once before moving onto a contraption, which I think was called an R-Jo (or something like that) to help me stand up  and move. From there I quickly moved onto just using a zimmer frame for getting up and moving across. I knew walking was still a bit off from just how wobbly I was at this stage. Simply standing in one position even with the help of the zimmer was utterly exhausting.

When speaking to someone who had been in bed for three weeks after a compound fracture he told me he had to pretty much learn to walk again as his muscles had totally gone in even that short a period. I think it's safe to say my baseline was even lower than his so it was always going to be a long process for me. I had to prepare mentally for that, and this is where the physio team were especially good. They place demands on you for sure, but they are always realistic ones. I don't know if I just got lucky but the relationships I had with the physio team I had at that stage were just magic, especially Suzanne, who quite outrageously ripped the pish out of me on any given number of fronts. This I loved. In fact the same was true of most of the nursing staff too. You'd be forgiven for assuming that ICU is an incredibly serious and morose. With the amount of patients that don't make it allied to the number that are sedated or delirious then it's a fair assumption but the reality is far from that. Of course when the situation merits it then the staff at all levels are all business but there can be a lot of stuff happening on any given day that genuinely does lighten the mood of the place a bit for those that are aware enough to notice, and this is massively important. The camaraderie between the team that exists is so important to it functioning not just as a facility to get you ready enough for transfer to a ward but for you to stay sane in the meantime, I think at least. It occurred to me early on that these teams don't get nearly enough credit for the job they do as, like A&E specialists too for that matter, they are often viewed simply as the ones who keep patients alive long enough for the actual medics to come in and fix the real problem. Of course that's tangibly bollocks but because the patients they get in are often in such a bad way that death becomes such a reality of life in there that I just feel that they're not given the respect they deserve just because they have such a specialist range of skills that maybe wouldn't transfer to a ward job. I appear to be ranting.

I was really struggling to communicate by this point. The trachae being in obviously ruled out talking (although I'm told that there was the slightest whisper you could just about hear over the beeps and pumps of all the machines around me if it was important) but I had my phone where I could type things out if necessary and a card with the alphabet on it to tap things out, although that was incredibly infuriating. For reasons that nobody has ever actually clarified I had tremors that were uncontrollable. This meant the typing out of messages was difficult and trying to point to the correct letter on my card was difficult too. Even the slightest message was an exercise in patience for me and the person trying to decode it. Some days the tremors were so bad it was.

This did result in the most brutal haircut I ever had as I could only really specify a number two with the clippers but couldn't explain that was just for the back and sides so she just battered in and took the lot off. I thought it was funny right enough.