There has been a lack of posts this month despite my unending resolutions to post more often for my dwindling audience of one; me. The audience is dwindling because I just write into the ether without much bothering to read the result. Gosh, this site is turning into therapy.
However, I have a better excuse this time. I have spent two spells in hospital recently. I will not bore you with the details but they involved lots of drips into my veins and trying to enable me to eat again.
It is the getting me to eat again that troubles me.
I am a diabetic who was having serious trouble holding anything solid down. Neither hospital addressed the issue of a diet to wean me back on to real food rather than a dextrose drip.
The Royal Sussex County Hospital (Brighton) was better on anti-emetics, anti-thrush etc. (as the consultant said, she was going to throw everything at me) so I could eat quite quickly. Worthing Hospital was less good but that is not the point; Worthing could not provide me with anything edible even if I had been fully fit.
At Brighton they bring around a menu asking you to select from it for lunch and dinner. You get to choose separately what you want for pudding. This is very important; it meant that I could choose ice cream even if nothing else was suitable for my acidic stomach. It was Wall's Cornish at my guess but that is good enough in hospital.
I had one decent meal at the Royal Sussex which was a very good Shepherd's Pie. Good mince, nice real potatoes well cooked and mashed. It may have been followed by ice cream but I also got a medium to good egg custard at the Royal Sussex.
I had one meal at Worthing Hospital. Liver & Onions. I could have eaten liver & onions prepared by myself. OK, I would have used lambs or calves livers thinly sliced in a nice sauce a la Hannibal. This was a hard turd on a plate.
Worse, it was served with what purporded to be mashed potatoes. It was not. It was a ball of glutinous gell.
The pudding (compulsory) was pineapple chunks. For a diabetic with suspected ketoacidosis? It might as well have been arsenic.
When I told two of the doctors about the above meal, one of them turned her nose before I had got so far as "Liver &..." and the other said he never ate in. He did promise to do something about it but I had discharged myself and signed a waiver before he had the chance to do so (about a day later).
I knew that if I did not discharge myself and sign the waiver they would surely kill me.
Oh, by the way, they punished me for discharging myself by refusing to issue to me a prescription for the antibiotics they said I needed.
This is a little postscript on breakfast. Royal Sussex wins again.
Royal Sussex offers about 5 or six cereals. Worthing offered cornflakes, some other type of grainy cornflakes or a weetabix substitute. But you could have sugar on your rice krispies at Royal Sussex!
Another very big thing is toast:
At the Royal Sussex they bring along toast after you have eaten your cereal. You choose how many slices you get, how many pats of butter and how many (and what variety) of preserves you got.
At Worthing Hospital I got, along with my cereal, one slice of stale untoasted bread, one pat of butter and one pack of liquid raspberry flavoured something or other. The latter two items were of course entirely redundant. Nothing could have disguised the unwholesomeness of the stale bread.
I have saved the best for last. Worthing boasts about its catering. See the luxury world.
