Getting A Break

It took going in for a surgery, and being warded for a couple of days post-op for monitoring, to finally get us to take a proper break, like taking that vacation where you did nothing except stay in the hotel all day, calling for room service and not even stepping foot out of the hotel except for a short leisurely stroll.

Because even on our planned vacations, those turn into full-on planned trips where we’re out almost the entire day and are only in the hotel to shower and sleep. Except for our Phuket trips, where we instead sleep on the beach part of the time. But we’re still heading out to Jungceylon instead of just doing absolutely nothing in the hotel room, and even on the beach part of the time is spent wading in the waters or wandering the stretch of the beach. We’ve never really had a vacay where it was purely doing nothing except eat and sleep, where rest was really just resting.

Being warded? Well, it wasn’t at a great time as there were work deadlines and projects to factor in (it never is a great time), but we needed to get the surgery done stat so we decided better now than later, when we might have second thoughts about getting the surgery done. And while we couldn’t avoid the occasional work text and all, it was relatively quiet during the time we were warded because it was just after May Day and we decided not to bring our work laptop along to the hospital, and our colleagues were already informed we were going for surgery. Meals were served at certain hours, but were just left on our table or us to dine when we woke up, no pressure (and we don’t mind eating cold meals).

With most of work issues able to be safely ignored, all that was left was for us to get some much needed down time and rest. Not just in the physical sense post-op, but actually more towards some me-time/quiet time. It was the kind of down time that one couldn’t get when resting at home really, well at least not for us. While we had to put up with nurses coming in every other hour to take our blood pressure, heart rate and temperature from 7am until 2am, all we did was just stay in bed, left to our own devices (books, iPad, iPhone, and Switch namely). No gallivanting. No visitors as we didn’t announce what was going on on social media, nor did we give exact details to others who had some idea we were going for a surgery.

We suppose it was also because rather than the usual ‘taking a day off to get personal stuff done’ or similar, where if something urgent came up at work we felt that we had to invest some attention and time to resolving it, this time we could allow ourself to really feel justified to ignore anything and everything, and just...rest. Work can fuck off until we go back. Other people can take care of themselves. To be honest, even other personal matters like the upkeep of our pad, or our motor insurance renewal (which was an early reminder really) all just took a back seat. And we found the ability to tell anything you don’t want to do to fuck off, I need to rest now, to be justified for it and also personally not feel guilty about it, to be rather liberating and novel.

That enforced rest felt...good. We were thankful that we pushed for admission the night before the surgery (as it turns out the regular practice for afternoon surgery was to be admitted in the morning of the surgery itself), and that we were still warded for monitoring a couple more days post-op. Except for the night after the surgery itself, where we were irked by the other patient in our room (note to self, if ever hospitalised again push for single room and pay the extra) to the point we didn’t sleep the entire night, thankfully he was discharged the next morning and peace reigned in our room after that.

It’s not the same once we were discharged and came home. Granted, we could take a proper shower once the dressing and drain was removed, but...

...we can’t have the a/c on the entire time (because the electricity bill!), and the days are hot and sweaty currently...

...while we can just stay in our room, we are still staying with family, which while we were still left mostly on our own it was still a tad stifling as we had morning barge-ins to ask if we were going to wake up to eat our breakfast and fixed dinner times...

...once discharged, and with the dressings and drain removed, we were pretty much mobile with no restrictions, which meant we would also feel like going out rather than staying home...

...and we’ve started checking work emails, sigh...

It was good while it lasted. So it is rather saying something that we have to consider getting warded as one of the better moments we’ve experienced so far this year.