My dream is to build The New Railway into a sustainable business.
I think I’d been making good progress up until a few months ago, hence why this website opened, and the blog posts stopped.
The research and development phase had been progressing as I expected, so had my following on social media. I was having some good interactions with people and had even had my first (unexpected) locomotive sale.
At 2am on a Tuesday morning, the steady progress I‘d been making abruptly stopped: I woke with a significant pain in my abdomen unlike anything I’d ever felt. Being kicked in the spuds would have been a welcome relief. I honestly felt as if I were about to burst. No matter what I done, how I sat or moved about the pain would not subside.
It got too much, I woke my wife and told her we needed to visit the hospital. Fortunately, my parents were staying with us, and while my mum and wife came with me to the hospital, my dad could look after our little boy.
As luck would have it, this was the morning of our staff company conference. In that moment I felt someone was looking down on me favourably. I text my manager who messaged back, when she woke:
“Phil, this is an extreme way of getting out of the staff conference”
We had initially phoned for an ambulance at 4am. The operator explained the wait would be 4 hours. I think I could have crawled to the hospital in less time. By the time we drove ourselves I was expecting 4:15 on a Tuesday morning would be as empty as the streets. When the doors to A&E slid open, I could see a field of bobbing heads like sunflowers in a storm.
The lady at the door made us aware the present waiting time was 7 hours. I felt this was a sort of test: if it is that serious, we would wait. Perhaps it’s something they say to people who may have lesser injuries to deter them. Her sage prediction proved to be accurate.
My wife had to go to the school she works at when they opened. My mother bless her stayed the course for the entire wait. I have no idea how she done it, but she proved beyond any doubt the stuff she was made of that day: sustaining the mind-numbing inactivity while all round us chaos. The time for me dripped by in a delightful haze of painkillers which carried me a drift a serene barge in my mind opening many mental doors and exploring my inner most thoughts.
Soon a canula, after many broken needles, was skilfully inserted into my hand. It soon became the foundation of irritation beyond pale. According to my nurse “your veins are woefully shit” – I appreciated her honesty which made me belly laugh! My wife left the room to dry heave in the carpark.
After the passing of 7 hours, we were seen by a doctor who told us my blood work was fine.. aside from something which showed I was fighting an infection and suggested I be scanned. A few hours later I found myself being slid into a sort of sci-fi doughnut. The canula was hooked up to a machine that pumped my body full of a kind of dye which the machine could analyse and view my interior better. I imagined they were looking at me from the control room the same way I look at the insides of locomotives on the computer. A lady told me the dye will make me feel like I’ve pissed myself. It did. Now I know why the toilet is so close to this machine.
We passed through the labyrinth back to the A&E waiting area for another hour before a special search party extracted me and mum from the crowd to tell us the results of the scan. For the time we had been there I had lost count of the number of people told the result of something right square in front of my eyes, for some reason we were told
“let’s go somewhere quiet to discuss your results”
– that frightened me terribly. A white feeling of dread flashed through me, there was some unknown quantity about my person which had suddenly made its presence known and how quickly the game of life is about to change. Maybe I was over reacting? I thought briefly about my parents, my wife, my boy, the people who have been kind to me and my friends. I turned my thoughts to all the ideas and things I wanted yet to create. Then I thought deeply about Fiona, perhaps I will be seeing her sooner than later. I felt very much if I could see my friend again it would make things easier. I was glad to have mum there in that moment. We were still in a crowd of people who’s vibrancy quickly diminished into the pale tones of the walls and we were ushered into a stainless steel elevator, still with our chaperone, who led us from the mele into the peace of a new floor:
Welcome to the surgical assessment ward.
Presently, we are sat in a new waiting room with mum, and three other people who were all quiet as mice, the sort of mice who were about to be fed to a pet snake. One lady was in the corner having a phone conversation about a surgery she was about to have. She was scared. She was saying everything I was feeling.
What am I doing here? I should be at the work conference!
A lady called me through to take my blood pressure. It was so high, she asked me if I was on medication.
“You need to tell me what the hell am I doing here?”
“The surgeon will discuss that with you in a moment”
The lift doors open, my wife has found us. What a ray of sunshine in that moment.
So, the three of us resume waiting together in the room. They’re either side of me keeping up-beat conversation alive. I’m feeling like I’m in a bubble. Not knowing what’s wrong, why I’m here, the pain - a humble reminder our present reality not least something I so desire to wake from. In moments of stress, I’ve become cognesant of pulling the walls in and I know I need to engage with them to break out of the mental cocoon I’m trying to protect myself with.
The surgeon is here, with his gang. Swept into another room, he asks me to recline on a bed. Sucking in my abdomen, he grabs hold of my gallbladder, with both hands.
I scream like a dog that’s just been kicked down an alley. I didn’t know I could scream like that. It was a scream for TV, it was a scream for the whole department. It was a scream for just about anyone who cared to hear it.
“I shouldn’t be able to do that. Mr Fry, your gallbladder is seriously infected. We need to keep you in for several days to get the infection down and then you may need to have surgery to remove it.”
Best news I’d received that day. It wasn’t a worse case scenario. I counted myself extremely fortunate and blessed. I’m fully aware, for so many other people, that conversation could have gone another way.
I felt foolish for what I had thought earlier. But I knew I needent feel that way. For the first time in a long while my perception of this cosy existance I had niched out had been challenged and I reacted in a way by thinking about the people I love. Despite knowing a part of me would need to come out, I felt whole.
So, there we had it. And as it turned out, I spent the next week in hospital. And I can’t thank enough my mum who stayed by my side every long minute of the day, or my wife and dad for doing everything they could.
My dad always says to me “don’t do the time, make the time work for you.” I think that’s advice often given to prisoners on their first stay in prison.
I brushed up on some books about marketing and some ideas for the railway. I even tried to explain them to a bewildered nurse. I think I have a really good idea for the railway, let explain at the end.
My hospital visit was a couple of months ago, and I have surgery to remove my gallbladder in its entirety due in two weeks from today.
I had a few weeks off work after I was discharged and given a bunch of drugs to take at home to quell my infection.
My time off the ball took the wind out of me and it’s all because I got out of rhythm. I lost my momentum. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to build it up again, and now I can feel the beat, I want to max the tempo.
The time I've had in these past few weeks has made me think a lot about my stay in hospital and how I felt going in, not knowing what was wrong and thinking the worse. I've thought about the people in the hospital, my family and my friends. I've thought about the railway too. I think what I take for granted is the connection between everyone and how much we need eachother. I struggle to show tenderness, but it is something so freely given. I build a railway as a vehicle in which tenderness or tender moments may be conveyed - as I've already enjoyed with my boy.
I hope very much, The New Railway can be a device in which people can build connection with eachother and I think perhaps I would benefit from that a little bit of that too.
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