Half Life - 6 – Blood
December 4th 2020
The bleeding from my right eyeball has been getting gradually worse. The crusted blood in the corner comes away easily each morning but, unless the Sandman cut his finger when sprinkling his magic dust, there is probably something not quite right. It’s not a Halloween-style torrent of the red stuff pouring down my face, more a gentle leaking when I squeeze it shut. Although my crying at the state of the world is worthy of blood, I’m not able to summon forth a deluge at will. If I could, the application for Britain’s Got Talent would already be in the post. Strangely, it doesn’t hurt.
A deep sense of personal pride swelled up when the doctor agreed with my diagnosis as we chatted on the phone. The value of reading the little leaflets inserted into every packet of tablets I shove down me on a daily basis had finally paid off. We both thought it was side-effect suffered by one in a hundred, and I was the lucky one in the medical lottery. Time to stop taking that tasty chemical morsel and wait for the eye to clear up before every pillowcase in the house has received my personal stamp of red DNA.
Self-diagnosis is, probably, not the most reliable approach to taking care of your health. Doctors, when you find the right one, are better at it. At just after 10.30 on the morning of the 7th January 2019 a very experienced oncologist told me I had advanced prostate cancer. My excruciating backache was not, as I and three different doctors over the previous six months had thought, a slipped disk, appendicitis, sciatica, or lumbago. From that moment on, with barely a moment to stop, cry, or realise the consequences of what the diagnosis meant, I was plunged into the extraordinary world that is the NHS. It’s a fantastical, mysterious, alternative universe, crowded with people, machines, equipment and buildings I never knew existed or could exist. My only relationship with it until then had been limited to feeling out of place in maternity wards, occasional visits to my local GP, and giving it considerable amounts of money every year through my taxes.
In this Covid year days are marked by excruciating dullness and I don’t get out much. The view from my front window, looking out on a small corner of The Village, provides almost no entertainment. Average daily activity is three people (one of them clearly lost), the postman, a couple of cats and some pigeons. Brief encounters with Amazon’s drop and run-away service breaks the spell now and again, together with the occasional sight of Sainsbury’s delivering a selection of groceries they have decided should replace the ones we ordered. The Wife’s suggestion that we drive somewhere with a nice view to have lunch, a flask of warm tea and sandwiches perched on the dashboard as we look out of the car window, feels a little too trainspotter and I have some self-respect left. The only relief from this high level of excitement comes in the form of day trips visiting a variety of different medical facilities provided by the NHS. The catering is not quite up to the National Trust’s quality, but the disabled toilets are better.
The unifying passion in an otherwise wonderful NHS is a disturbing obsession with needles. Each happy trip usually results, at some point, with me being stuck in some part of my body with something sharp. As a mid-level trypanophobe these days out do not bring levels of joy on a par with a day out at The Cotswold Wildlife Park or a nice pub lunch. The NHS has taken so much blood from my arms I’m sure there is a nation of vampires in the dungeons of the Churchill Hospital dependent on my donations. When others talked about taking tablets, I was treated to chemotherapy involving a needle large enough to inflate footballs stuck into me for an hour. On the plus side, the chemo-machine I was tubed-up to was one that actually went ‘ping’. Radiotherapy sounded OK to start with, but they joined in with the poking obsession and insisted on tattooing me so they could focus the red laser crosshairs on the same spot each time, and the dream of finding needle free treatment vanished. Since they were doing a tattoo, I asked for one of Dolly Parton. The nurse told me she had done her left nipple and I would have to fill in the rest myself.
The NHS even treated me to my first weekend away on my own for years, when I was diagnosed with sepsis and forced to sleep over at one of their older, and less well maintained, hotels. I entered into yet another symbiotic relationship with a thin metal tube as I was pumped to the, not yet bleeding, eyeballs with antibiotics for three days. I did learn that cancer lets you jump to the front of the Saturday night A&E queue, leaving the bent-nose drunks and the mothers of pan-wearing eight-year olds behind to complain about their wait. It’s like being on the VIP guest list at a night club, but one dedicated to keeping it customers alive.
When not sticking holes in me, a secondary form of entertainment is to force me into a freezing cold metal tube, tell me to stay still for an hour, and get me listen to rhythmic electro magnetic resonance noises which put Kraftwerk’s less accessible later albums to shame. Although there is always an offer of listening to the radio while in the MRI, I’ll take the mechanical madness over Jeremy Vine every time; at least you know the MRI is not just meaningless noise. If the day out takes a serious turn for the worse, in what is surely a premeditated conspiracy to torture claustrophobes who also have a hatred of needles, you get a CT scan. Whoever thought that pushing you through a tube while, at the same time, injecting coloured liquid into your arm was going to get me to write a positive review on Trip Advisor needs to rethink the whole experience.
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'trypanophobe' - nice word! I see you got your thesaurus out!
(Nice work BTW!) - Miffy
So unapologetically honest. What other way is there to be?!