Blog: Back home from hospital

Blog: Well readers, I'm pleased to be able to announce to those who have stuck with me through the thick and thin of my many medical disasters over the last two years, I'm finally home from hospital and this time . . . I think we've cracked it, writes Emma Suddaby.

I don't look too clever – just for a change – I have one foot in a surgical Aircast boot, one arm in a right-angle plaster from wrist to shoulder and a central line still fitted to my neck to allow the wonderful district nurses to continue pumping me full of strong antibiotics.

But I'm in good company with the Orthopaedic Hospital's long-term resident and mascot, Percy the peacock sporting the veterinary equivalent of my surgical boot after narrowly avoiding a brush with birdy heaven on the roads around the hospital.

Unlike me, frolicking about at home like a spring lamb in the sunshine, drunk with new-found freedom, poor old Perc' is still recuperating at the RSPCA's pleasure – nursing a broken toe at a specialist veterinary hospital in Nantwich.

I hope he doesn't get his claws under the table too comfortably in Nantwich though. I've been a regular at the Orthopaedic for the last 14 years and Percy the Peacock has been roaming hospital grounds at least that long, after first appearing on the roof of one of the cottages opposite the hospital in the dead of night.

Which gives a twist to the classic "why did the peacock cross the road?" Why, because he could see which side his bread was buttered on, of course!

Lots of visitors dropping sandwiches and lots of windows to preen in and shake his feathers at, are probably amongst his reasons to stay but he has become an unintentional mascot at the RJAH Orthopaedic Hospital, much loved by staff and visitors.

I wish him a speedy recovery and look forward to seeing him strutting his stuff around hospital grounds again very soon.

I owe my own escape from hospital to a little group of unsung heroines, the Llanfair Caereinion District Nurses who have stepped up their game lately, to include administering IV drips at home, to patients who need them. This simple policy change spells a really big and positive lifestyle change for many patients just like me. I've lost count of the number of times I've been admitted to hospital in the last year requiring a simple, daily IV drip treatment. So I sit, filing my nails all day in my NHS bed, blocking it for those much more in need of nursing than me, and all for an hour a day on the drip.

District nurses have traditionally not been allowed to administer drip treatments at home, and when I lived in Shrewsbury I challenged this many times to no avail.

Who would have thought the little old country nurses out here in the Powys hills would be the first to have enough courage and vision to start offering this service to patients like me? It has already made a huge difference to my quality of life and will surely make an even bigger difference to the budgets and efficiency of the NHS.

Well done the Llanfair District Nurses, it's a big thank you from me!