Wednesday 14 July 2010

HEALTH BULLETIN NO. 9

If you have just joined us let me summarize: Iain has been in the Western Infirmary for 2 weeks now. He is there as a result of a DIY accident. You can read details if you scroll down from here or click on Iain's accident in the sidebar at the right, lower down, to CATEGORIES. It is a sort of 'folder' with all the Health Bulletins.

He has been on a surgical ward after falling 2 stories in the house. He has cracked a couple of vertebrae and has one cracked rib. The worst bit was that he fell (whether on the upper floor before he dropped on to the lower, we don't know) on his right side bruising his chest wall and his right lung badly.

The good news is that he has got his chest problem (which was the most immediate worry) sorted i.e. the pleural cavity is now drained and today he transferred to the orthopaedic ward on Level 8. At the moment he is in Room 18.

He is confined to bed (having been there for 2 solid weeks) for another 4 weeks in order to stabilize the vertebrae. Then the plan is to fit him with a brace. That will remain for awhile longer ... weeks? months? I guess it depends on the healing.


From looking at other people on the ward they appear to have sort of ?fibre-glass ?plastic panels or plates back and front which are fastened by Velcro on the sides. In my mind I pictured a plaster of Paris body cast. Don't know if they do that nowadays...

Whatever it is going to be I do not think it will have the je ne sais quoi of Rembrandt's Man in Armour which hangs in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. This photo* shows more of the garb than my recollection from viewing the painting some time ago. I recall that it was very dark and all you saw was the burnished gold and light on the fellow's - actually it is Alexander the Great - face.

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* Public domain, Glasgow Museums. This is (Rembrandt's Scillian patron) Ruffo's Allesandro Magno, i.e. there is another one.

1 comment:

Vagabonde said...

I have read all the health bulletins and am pleased that he is recovering well. It is not easy to stay in hospital for 6 weeks and I hope it won’t be too hard for him. It is nice that you place all these bulletins on the computer as I am sure many of your relations can follow his progress this way.
My daughter and her husband will be moving to Nashville, Tennessee soon. She was offered a fellowship at Vanderbilt University in her medical specialty and her husband has found a position with a group of physicians. They looked pretty hard and found a French au pair to come and help with the 1 ½ years old and the 3 ½ years old, hoping too that they will learn French. I have read that the best time to teach children a foreign language is up to 5 years of age as they can pick up the accent easily. Then even if they don’t speak it later on they can pick up the accent again. There are many books for little children in foreign languages; maybe your grandchildren could learn their numbers in Spanish, or French? My first cousin’s son, who is Armenian married a Japanese when he lived in California. My cousin went to see his grand daughter (they now live in Singapore) who is 3 years old, she speaks Japanese, English and Armenian. He says sometimes she mixes the languages but lately she has become much better.