Jean Revisited

Given the enthusiastic feedback I got about my hospital room mate, I thought I’d share a bit more about her.

Jean, bless her soul, was 80 and in for her second hip replacement (non-cemented, which continues to confuse me). She talked incesantly; something made all the more fun by her lack of hearing skills leading to frequent miscommunication.

I don’t remember Jean’s daughters’ names, but for the sake of the story let’s call them Anna and Jane. One of the first things Jean told me was about was her doctor saying she must have a very good diet. “I’d best not tell Anna about that” she told me, laughing, “she’s vegetarian you see” in a way which suggested two things:

1 – Anna’s vegetarianism was a sensitive subject, but an amusing one.

2 – Anna couldn’t possibly have a good diet as a vegetarian, and would be upset that her meat-eater mother did.

She didn’t quite know what to say when I told her that I am vegetarian, too.

Later that afternoon she talked to her daughters on the phone. When she thought she was talking to her other daughter, Jane, she said the same as she’d said to me. Turns out she didn’t know who she was talking to, and had told her funny story about her good diet and not telling Anna, to Anna. Despite hearing it happen (being only about two metres away), she told me all about the confusion as soon as she was off the phone.

Jean was so good at talking that she really didn’t need a response. She was having a conversation with herself, and just directing it at me. One afternoon I didn’t reply for long enough to fall asleep, and when I did she was still going. When I woke up she appeared to have bored herself to sleep, too.

When my epidural wore off, I felt terrible. Overdramatic, “I-want-to-die” kind of terrible. Apparently it’s quite common for epidurals. But because Jean had also felt terrible, she subsequently refused to take any pain medication at all. Several people explained that it was the epidural, not the pain medication, that had made her feel like that – I tried to tell her that I’d had the same experience – but she wouldn’t have a bar of it.

Because of this, she was naturally in a lot of pain. You should have heard her complain about the orderlies “throwing [her] around”. She was angry because they didn’t explicitly ask her if she had been taking the morphine, despite the fact that every other sane patient does. I watched them be quite careful with her, so I must have missed the throwing bit. I thought that was quite a shame; my minimal sympathy a result of having to listen to her moan about her pain while refusing to do anything about it and not listening to the nurses about the epidural.

But the icing on the Jean cake came at about 2am one morning. Jean needed to go to the bathroom, and decided that 2am was the best time for her to get up for the first time since her surgery. She disagreed with the nurse, who told her just to use the pan because it was the middle of the night and that she would be getting up in the morning anyway. Now, I know from experience that it’s not easy – I cried from the pain the first time I got out of bed – which is why Jean was far from discreet about the ordeal. The whole thing took about half an hour, but the best bit was when she practically yelled “I HOPE I’M NOT WAKING GABRIELLE UP, I’D HATE TO DO THAT!” No Jean, your overwhelming subtlety could never wake me.

Jean was a constant source of both entertainment and irritation in hospital. I do hope she’s doing well though; she was certainly quite a character.