MINE'S BIGGER'N YOURS!

* Doctors are a weird and wonderful bunch aren't they? I remember waking up from having my appendix out on my 18th. birthday and being greeted by a wildly enthusiastic surgeon informing me that the offending dangly object, was the l-o-n-g-e-s-t he had ever seen, let alone removed! Blushing furiously and not quite knowing how to respond, I shyly told him he could keep the thing, if he liked... to which he very seriously - and majestically ignoring the tittering nurses - told me he would be honoured to do.

I wonder if he did keep it and where it is now?
Floating in green stuff in a jar, on a dusty shelf at the back of some forgotten hospital cupboard?
Proudly displayed in some teaching hospital in the U.S. bought years ago for an exorbitant sum?

Wow! Think I'll google it! (You never know...)

* The above memory was jolted from its mental pigeon hole by a visit to Steph on her blog The biopsy report. Steph is a very brave lady and an inspiration to us all to fight on and stay optimistic, in the face of horrific illness. Happily, she is better now - and her skull is famous too! Good luck to you Steph. Stay well!

ONE DROP TOO MANY

It was just another routine visit to the lung specialist.
‘Got a cold?’ He asked jocularly, whilst writing my usual inhaler prescription.
‘Just the same old sniff. You know, the one I've had for years.’
‘Ah yes.’ He beamed. ‘Anything else?’
‘No, except for a twinge in my left temple. Would aspirin help do you think? Can’t lay on that side without it hurting.’
‘Really?’ He was bolt upright now. ‘You’d better see the internal medical specialist.’

3 months later:
‘Pain in the left temple is it?’ Asks the IMS. ‘You had better have a C.T. scan. Anything else troubling you?’
‘Well… I have had a dodgy stomach for a couple of years now.’
‘Really? Better have a colonoscopy as well then.’
‘Huh?’
‘Just to be on the safe side.’

1 month later:
‘The results of the colonoscopy are fine,' chirps the IMS and I sigh with relief...
'However the C.T. scan results are not good. The left sinuses are very narrow and distorted and bunged up. I’ll give you a letter for an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist.

2 months later:
The ENT specialist is convinced I am someone else entirely and is cross when I insist I am not! His computer is not even turned on and he huffily ignores the IMS’s written request to diagnose my C.T. scan. Instead, he shines a light up my right nostril from about a meter away and tells me I have hay fever.
‘Hay fever? In one side of my nose?’ I ask. ‘And besides doctor, you are looking up the wrong nostril.’
Crossly, he shines the light up the other nostril and tells me I am a typical hyperactive English person (!) Grrr…So I ask if he is referring to my Anglo/Celtic character - which he does not know - or to some mysterious sinus anomaly, unique to Brits in general? Ha! However the man couldn’t care less and dismisses me with a prescription for one small bottle of nose spray, with instructions to squirt it up both nostrils for the rest of my life; ‘because we don’t want to get polyps now do we?’ Fuming, I am back out in the corridor within five minutes, feeling as though I have just left the Twilight Zone!

By now another six months have passed and I return to the lung specialist – and tell him all! Frowning mightily, he downloads my C.T. scan, poo-poos the ENT specialist’s nose spray and prescribes new nose drops he nicknames ‘bombs’. Apparently these are ampules of a burning substance that should chemically ‘blow everything wide open’ and if that doesn’t work, I will need an operation. Though he hastens to reassure me that another ENT specialist will perform it. Too right mate!

Back home again, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Within the last six months, I have had my head stuck in a radioactive ‘oven’; had a 2 meter hose with a camera and lamp on the end of it shoved up my backside; been neglected and insulted by someone I went to in good faith; and am now on my knees with my head on the floor, squirting a ‘burning bomb’ up my left nostril! Not only that but I have exceeded my medical insurance ‘own risk’ for 2008 – and that ENT specialist got nearly half of it!

And the twinge in my left temple that started it all? Oh that’s still there – complete with a brand new nervous tic in the left eyelid....bah!
Wish I'd just taken that aspirin.........tic...

HOLES AND DINOSAURS

There is a gigantic hole at the end of my street and like starlings around a bacon rind we flock to view it. Its proportions are truly enormous and as we gawk admiringly, I detect communal pride and street solidarity in the contemplation of ‘our hole’. No one knows why it is there. Road works are a permanent fixture in our city. One day an intact road - next day a hole. No big deal.
Even so, this particular hole is truly magnificent (!) and we venture closer. Excited kids toss stones and we watch them bounce off the sides and plummet downwards. Shivering, I reflect that this must have been how the whole planet once was: A pitted globe of dank treacherous holes, in a ground torn apart by primeval earthquakes. A time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, perhaps on this very spot!
As I gaze with fascination into the newly dug aperture, I wonder what it is about holes that exert such magnetism on the human psyche? Take a hole in a garment for example. Goaded on by an almost instinctive, primeval urge, we are doomed to stick a finger in it! But what is a hole really? Nothing. It is simply not there - and yet it is - defined by its edges. It is a maddening concept.
Shrugging off my musings I hop back onto my bike and continue on round the corner to the shops – and stop dead! The whole main street is dug up, with a huge trench excavated along its entire length. The sand and soil from the trench is piled up high along its outer edge like a…dinosaur’s vertebrae (!) and the strip of road left over, is made even narrower by a row of parked cars along the pavement curb.
With a line of honking cars now piling up behind me, I peddle frantically. Well it isn’t my fault that there is no room for a car and a bicycle side by side…
Then suddenly and horribly – BAM! The door of a parked car swings open and I smash full tilt into it and fall to the ground. The car behind me screeches to a stop and I am vaguely aware of the driver extricating me from my damaged bike and yelling at the perpetrator.
'What the 'blazes' do you think you are doing?!'
A crowd is gathering, asking me if I am all right. I don’t know. My left hand is grazed and embedded with grit from the road and there is a large lump on the front of my right shin and something decidedly odd about my right hand. I hold it up and the ring finger swings drunkenly across the front of the little finger. It is obviously broken. The crowd sighs.
‘Insurance,’ I mumble and the perpetrator looks alarmed but under the baleful glare of the crowd, he writes his name, phone and car registration number on a piece of paper and gives it to me.
Then he tries to sneak off.
‘Hospital!’ I mutter, staring angrily at him.
The crowd hisses.
Chastened, he agrees and his female companion helps me into their car, while a helpful shopkeeper locks my damaged bike, props it up on a lamppost and drops the key into my coat pocket. I thank him through trembling lips.
What happens at the hospital is a bit of a blur. The perpetrator drops me at the entrance and screeches away without a word, which just stiffens my resolve to ‘get him’ later...grr..(insurance!).
They plaster the whole of my broken right hand and the left hand too is cleaned, ointmented and mummified in bandage. The lump on my shin is left to heal itself. Then an obliging nurse wraps my coat around me and sends me on my way with a medical report and instructions to report the incident to the police. Apparently knocking people off bikes with car doors is a crime! Ha!
Exhausted now, I take the tram home and don’t punch my card. How can I with two mummified hands? How will I manage when I get home - I am bursting for the loo!
Finally at my front door, I open my bag with my teeth and am staring helplessly down at the door key, when suddenly, like a guardian angel, my good neighbour Mrs. V., is swooping down upon me!
‘Potverdorie’! She clucks. Which I think is Dutch for 'damn the pots' but might mean 'good grief'!
‘Saw you from the window. Whatever’s happened? Here, let me help you off with your coat. Tut-tut!’
Surrendering to her kind ministrations, I am soon standing in my hallway being told by Mrs. V. that I am to come over directly and have a nice cup of tea and that she’ll leave her front door open a crack, so that I don’t have to ring the bell with my nose…. Dear Mrs. V..
Wearily I lean back against the wall of the hallway. My swaddled hands are throbbing badly and alone at last I fight down tears of self-pity. Then suddenly my eyes fly open! Mesmerized I stare ahead, as somewhere deep within my brain stem, echoes of a primeval Jurassic past are stirring. Earthquakes, chasms and HOLES… I must be feverish. Then unbidden and instinctively, I sense her! My ‘Terrible Lizard’ is waking and as her massive mouth roars out her mighty pain and frustration, I can hold back the tears no longer...(!)
There's a h-hole in my coat and I don't have a f-finger to poke it with...waahh!