more surgery

It's been a difficult week, medically speaking. Del could barely get out of bed on Monday (he works with a large number of those disease vectors known as parents) and was off Tuesday as well. They let him work from home on Wed so as not to re-spread the germs. I thought I had avoided it - felt a bit off on Monday but was fine the other days - but woke up exhausted and headachy and very ill today. Bah. I stayed home and hopefully will be fine tomorrow.

Meanwhile, my supervisor's wife has been very ill and he has barely been in the lab, and one of our collaborators has had to go home to Finland (?) as she's caught pneumonia.

Then today, while swooning on the couch feeling sorry for myself, the Nuffield Orthopaedic hospital called to say there'd been a cancellation, and could I come in for surgery on Saturday! Yikes! This is very similar to how they booked my MRI - the consultant said he put me on the list, then I suddenly got a call on a Saturday morning at 8am asking if I could come in for a 10am slot. Efficient but not big on notice, has been my NHS experience. I can only compare this to the American experience, which involved being sent a lot of letters about exactly what needed to be done, where to be, what to have on hand etc, and then given a full medical examination before they'd touch my knee. However, this is just an arthroscopic surgery to fish out a fragment (of cartilage, I assume) that either didn't get picked up in the first surgery or broke off later. So maybe it's less major. The doc thinks the fragment is causing my symptoms (knee locking up, soreness, knee feeling like it's twisting the wrong direction) so hopefully this will sort it all out once again.

Anyway, no idea what to expect but the receptionist says someone will call tomorrow and hopefully tell me what to expect. Luckily I now have a permanent Del, so no need to get anyone to fly out and take care of me!