Idle thoughts

Being confined to a hospital bed for 6 weeks as I have just been is not fun. It is,in fact,the antithesis of fun. When I first arriived at the Royal North Shore Hospital I was very unwell. The bacterial infection had really knocked me around and I had lost 10kgs. I was on a 24 hour IV injection of antibiotics and trying to sleep with an IV device permanently attached to your arm is a real struggle particularly in a busy hospital where there are devices sounding off every few minutes even through the night.
Over a six week period you get very bored with reading,watching TV and surfing the internet. Your mind wanders and you doze. My long confinement was due to the fact that the doctors were hoping that the antibiotics would clear the bacterial vegetation which had attached itself to my heart valve. It was not to be so in the end they decided to open me up and replace the diseased valve. Not exactly a minor procedure. They did this just two weeks ago and I was home 8 days later. Now I am recuperating and getting a little stronger every day although there is a long way to go. I am still only firing on 4 cylinders but looking forward to firing on 5 in the next week or so.
Of course having nothing constructive to do for such a long period of time does give you time to think. My thoughts were always on what I was missing-my lovely wife and her delicious food- why is hospital food so awful-,my cats,my friends,the grandchildren,the garden,the open air- I really missed the open air,my Porsches and my photography.
It may be a statement of the bleeding obvious but hospitals are full of sick people and a cardiac ward is full of very sick peope.This makes a depressing environment even more depressing. I seriously wonder whether my long confinement has left me a little traumatised it was so awful. It is certainly an experience I never want to repeat.
For now I will be concentrating on getting totally well and fit and when I am there are quite a few things which I had previously taken for granted which I will appreciate so much more.
Top photo by me.The open air. Spring flannel wildflowers Wyrrabalong National Park near Forresters Beach,NSW.Photo taken on my Hasselblad 500 on Kodak Portra 400 film.