Flowers definitely help the healing process

Every time that I started a sentence with: "if I owned a hospital", I made Jonny giggle. Research shows that patients recover quicker if there is lots of green around them and I am not talking about Cooking Apple Green© or other paint colours. So I would make sure there are lots of nice trees and plants in and around the hospital. I am not aware of a research of the healing effects of good food, but I am sure that healthy home cooked food works wonders for a speedy recovery. So good food would be item number two on my ideal hospital environment list. And yes, it is true what they say about hospital food, in case anybody wonders…

Speaking of colours, before my operation I was a bit concerned that I would have to remove the beautiful Card-again© nail polish from my newly pedicured feet (Isn’t that a great name? Who comes up with names for paints and nail polishes? Is that a job?). When having a general anaesthetic, you are not allowed to wear any jewellery or make-up, including nail polish. Jewellery I can understand, you wouldn’t want a surgeon to get stuck behind your long dangly earrings for example and apparently they can tell a lot on your condition during the operation by the colour of your skin. But nails? So I decided to take the gamble and leave the nail polish, half folding my feet behind the hospital bed to hide my painted toe nails. Strange how it only takes a few minutes to be transformed from an individual to a patient. I had to change into to a theatre gown, put my hair in a cap, they shaved me and I was ready for theatre. But I still had my painted toe nails, my own little act of hospital rebellion! :-)

One of the first things I remember from waking up was the doctor telling me it had been a laparoscopy not a laparotomy, which was great news really, but I couldn’t have cared less at that moment, I was so drowsy. Second thing I remember was a nurse with a strange accent so I felt the compelling need to ask where she was from. It turned out she was from Scotland and had been in the Netherlands for over twenty years. Something to do with dogs, but in hindsight I am not completely sure how those two things were related. Anyway, I thought it was great news that she was Scottish so I immediately switched to English and asked her to call my husband. Which she didn’t want to do, but she did want to administer some pain killers. First things first. She asked me to rate the pain on a scale from one to ten, so I gave it a four. This has probably got to do with being Dutch, we never rate things very highly, giving a ten out of ten hardly ever happens, so four sounded good to me. She then injected me anyway and asked me again how I would rate the pain. That’s when I said it was more like a four now and that the first time it was probably a six. She said she had figured. It later turned out that four is the minimum pain threshold for administering drugs. Oh well.

Jonny wheeled me out of the hospital on Tuesday with four battle wounds on my tummy. The one around my navel, which is now extended to one and a half times its original size, looks like an amateur tried to make a work of art using play-doh. Needless to say that it is debatable whether I could be considered a human installation…


The last three days have been used for lots of resting, sleeping and emerging myself in all the love and attention that Jonny has been giving me. I am also enjoying all the calls (regular check-up calls from Geoff really kick ass!), the flowers and the cards. Attention from friends and family definitely gets top marks for speedy recovery and feeling better about one self. My friend Annemieke said that one of the advantages of recovering at home is the diva-like behaviour one can display. I am sure she meant loads of lounging in gorgeous silk pj’s on leather daybeds, but nothing could be further from the truth, since I am actually walking around in track suit bottoms (other things hurt!). But the one glamorous thing I still have going are my painted toe nails!