Being a Patient D.K. Doshisha International Jr/Sr High School, Kyoto, Japan

The summer holiday of 2003 left me with a memory which will not erode in time. I was able to experience a rare incident. While practicing during my rugby club activities, trying to dodge an opponent, I managed to damage my right knee badly enough so that I was not able to walk for quite a while. The doctor diagnosed it as a lesion of the menisci, which is damage to the plates on both sides of knee. As time passed though, I began to feel suspicious about the doctor's words - for it was taking far too long to heal for it to be a lesion of the menisci. Later on, I went to another doctor who was a knee specialist. It turned out that my suspicion was correct; it was not a lesion of the menisci, but a ligament injury to the right knee. According to the doctor's diagnosis, there would be no problem to live as I had been, except that I would not be able to move around as aggressively as I had been able to do before, for it would cause additional injuries, which meant no sports. No sport for the rest of my life was like Manchester United without Beckam. I had no choice but to go through an operation, which meant spending most of my summer holiday in hospital, and not being able to even jog for at least four months. There were severe demerits, but when comparing a summer holiday of pain and discomfort with a lifetime of no sport, I presumed spending a holiday at the hospital would be the wiser choice. So I got packed, and went to the hospital, getting a warm welcome from the nurses, and was then shown the bed that was to be my kingdom for a month. Funnily enough I had no fear of going under the knife. The drawing of blood and intravenous drips was far scarier, but I got used to the needles, I took twenty-two of them during my hospitalization. I expected to feel that it would be like walking towards a guillotine when I heard that I must walk to the operating room, though it turned out that I felt nothing more than just wanting to go to the toilet. I entered the cold, inhuman operating room, climbed onto the bed and got stripped by the assistants. I looked around the room while I could, because you do not often get the chance to enter places such as those. The anesthetic surged into me through the catheter and injection needle of the intravenous drip, and I lost consciousness before I knew it. When I woke up, the nurses were scurrying about like worker ants, conveying me to the intensive care unit. Firstly, I felt the dullness and the coldness of my body, which was to stay for a long time. The cold operation room had taken away all my heat and exchanged it with the chills, and because of that, I had to have a thermo blanket wrapped around me, though it was in the middle of summer. I was not able to be moved for at least a day, so I had a Foley catheter which took away the drudgery of going to the toilet, but this tube happened to be a big problem. You cannot pass water deliberately while you have this in you, the system of passing the water becomes slightly different, you just can not figure out how to. This was a tough problem for me until I got the hang of it, though it was still uncomfortable even when I did. Another, even more severe problem I had was pain, not from the operated leg, but from my stomach and back. I had to lie prostrate for quite a while; I was not even able to turn over, so as time elapsed, physical and mental pain began to set in. The dreadful night moved on like a snail, the pain did not allow me a decent sleep; the nurse who appeared repeatedly to check my temperature and blood pressure was quite annoying, and hunger prevented me from slipping into dreamland, which was my only escape from all those sickening feelings. The bright morning came, though my mood was still dim as night. The bed was raised to a seating position and that soothed my pain, which had lasted for sixteen hours. The breakfast which came later was the first substance I had put in my mouth in the last thirty five hours. After taking out the annoying Foley catheter, which was actually more painful than the operation itself, I was returned from the ICU to my sickroom. I still had blood draining tubes in my knee which restricted me from getting off of my bed, so I had to call the nurse every time I needed to go to the toilet, but for this I was able to enter the disabled patients' toilet for the first time, and probably last time in my life. Looking at the toilet, I realized that I was one of the challenged people now. When the tubes were taken out two days later, I felt like a freed prisoner. When my friends came to visit me, I felt like I had met the family I had not seen for years, though my mother had been visiting every day. I was happy to have friends who visited me sporadically. In addition, I was able to make friends with some of the inpatients close to my age, without them I would not have come out of the hospital mentally healthily. Spending a month in hospital is equal to being given the freedom to do anything, except to have fun. All I could do was to eat hospital food, sleep helplessly and go through a painful rehabilitation. My rehabilitation proceeded like clockwork; I was able to bend my knee more and more each day, though it felt like trying to turn a rusty door knob. The victorious feeling you achieve after hearing that you have improved was very refreshing. Overall, it was not comfortable staying in a hospital for a month, but it was not as bad as I expected. I am sure that this was a good, rare occasion to experience the inexperienced. All I wish now is that there will be no second time. Though unfortunately I am destined to return to this hospital in a year's time. I need to go there again to get the bolts out of my operated leg. How tragic!

Child Research Net would like to thank the Doshisha International Junior/Senior High School and Daisuke Takahashi, student and author, for permitting reproduction of this article on the CRN web site.

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