Am I A Student? Or Am I A Patient?

It’s hard to tell at the moment. I was meant to be in uni from 9am ’till 4pm today. However, I was only there from 9am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm. The rest of the time was spent in the plastics outpatient department and seeing the mental health adviser.

The plastics appointment wasn’t too bad. I got there at 10am and was given number 9 in the queue. I was finally taken into a room by the nurse at about 11.15am, whereupon she undressed the wounds, put a piece of gauze over them and went to get a medic. An SHO came in and poked and prodded the wounds. He said the structures were mainly intact and the numbness/altered sensation was probably because I cut close to a nerve. He then said they needed suturing though and he couldn’t decide whether to do them under local or general anaesthetic. He went to get his registrar.

The registrar was lovely. He said that they weren’t going to suture them today, because if they have got infected then suturing would just hold the infection inside. He made sure I was mentally OK and asked a few questions about the self-harm, whereupon my voice obviously wobbled because he said that he wasn’t trying to upset me and that even though he was primarily a surgeon, the mental wellbeing of his patients was paramount as well. He also just seemed to understand. I know that probably makes no sense, but to me it does!

So the nurse applied some local anaesthetic cream around the wounds and then covered them with cling film and left them for half an hour. By the time she and the SHO came back in it was 12.30pm and I was pretty certain that I would miss the appointment with A (the mental health adviser at the uni) at 1pm. Anyway the SHO scrubbed the wounds with iodine which was fucking painful. It stang so much and I was biting my finger and hyperventilating and nearly crying. The nurse was so sweet and just stroked my shoulder and kept saying “it’s OK sweetheart” and “you can scream if you want”. I felt so stupid. I mean I was sitting there almost in tears over some iodine solution being scrubbed into the wounds that I caused to myself without a thought for the pain!

They’ve steri-stripped them together and dressed them with more iodine, to prevent infection, padded dressings, a bandage and a tubigrip thing over the top. I have to go back on Friday to get the dressings changed and they will probably suture the wounds then as a delayed closure as I heal so slowly. However, when they took the original steri-strips off I was covered in welts and a rash in nice neat lines where the strips had been. So obviously I am allergic to steri-strips, and quite badly allergic as the welts had blistered and there is raw skin underneath. This is why they are thinking of suturing them on Friday.

So I finally left at 1.10pm and rang the counselling service straight away saying I would be a bit late but anticipated being there in 5 minutes. When I arrived there were a few forms to fill in and one of those CORE evaluation forms and then I got to meet A. She’s lovely and although the session mainly concentrated on the recent self-harm, because in her words “it’s quite a serious episode to need to be referred to plastics” we did talk a bit about other things. She wants to see me again on Friday at 3pm, which is after the plastics appointment to see how I got on and to talk about the other issues in a bit more depth. I think this may be a positive turning point.

Ruth