IDLEMILD - Life’s Rich Pageant While On Bedrest

Mar '26 For the past ten years, to the present day, I have spent all of this time with some timescale of bed rest required in my day from the effects of pressure sores. Pressure sores are the bane of the wheelchair users life. You are doing very well to avoid them at least once in your life. They are not to be treated lightly as my own testimony should confirm. In 2016, I was working in an office in Lochgilphead for the Local Authority. I was experiencing issues with spasm in my back, often causing intense spells of excruciating pain. I was being sent home from work early on a regular basis while I awaited the results of neurological investigation. I was experiencing a level of discomfort which caused me to shuffle and fidget regularly in my wheelchair as I attempted to settle a regular, pin prickly, burning sensation in my lower back. One morning I woke up with a bloody stain apparent on my bedsheet. I thought nothing much of it and went off to work. Over a spell of a ...

I had focus only for the clock facing me in my bed, on every hour passing through the night, as the ward slept. I was steadfast in my slightly hysterical belief that staying awake would slow down time and delay my inevitable day with the surgeon's scalpel dawning .   Indeed, i had not slept one wink and time was typically unmoved by my plight to relentlessly march on, and It was still all too soon, despite my best efforts, finding myself being moved in whispers and long silences by the hospital porters, and so unceremoniously i felt for something so seismic, out of the ward and brought in to surgery on the morning of Thursday 16th November 2006.  Another reason for my lack of sleep was because I was still reeling after undergoing an unexpected procedure in the hours following my admission the day before. By late afternoon on the Wednesday I knew what I really wanted more than anything was to be able to duck out of the following days operation. The scale of eve...