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2003-10-02 - 10:04 p.m.

It's about time I put some actual writing up here I guess. This is a chapter from the book I'm trying to pretend isn't in any way ripping off David Sedaris. Older readers will be familiar with some of the episodes, but this is the first time I've shown it in its entirety. As usual, constructive criticism is encouraged.

All words are copyright me.

The gland that time forgot

I�ve never been what you�d call a huge fan of confronting my own fragile mortality, so after the requisite time of ignoring, worrying about and then blowing out of all proportion a lump in my throat, I approached the hospital for a check up in an apprehensive manner.

I thought about popping into the unwelcomingly-named �Hospital Tavern� for a brace of stiffening ales, but entry looked tricky given that two people ON CRUTCHES were trying to knock seven bells out of each other in the doorway. It was kind of like jousting but without the horses or fair maiden with a big lacy conical hat dropping her hankie. I decided against, and besides, I wanted to give my blood tests at least a fighting chance of dipping below twenty percent proof.

I had to sit in the waiting room for around 90 minutes, which wasn�t so bad in itself but there was some militia type trying to fob his war stories onto the only person who would listen, an octogenarian man in pyjamas whose every other sentence was delivered in song.

Commando�s opening conversational gambit was that he �killed four people in Vietnam�, though it wasn�t made clear as to whether this was in the war or not.

�Where abouts were you stationed?� chirped up the old boy.

�Er�in the jungle,� bluffed Rambo, obviously not used to being pushed for actual details of his dubious military engagements.

He moved onto tales of training ground violence and how he �Once broke a man�s jaw in four places�, though I could only imagine it was from repeated dropping to the ground at being told unbelievable bullshit war stories. This impressed the pensioner no end, and inspired him to start on some convoluted story involving rucksacks and a trench, which was sadly cut short as he was called away to fulfil his urine test commitments.

The militia guy spouted out to no-one in particular: �God help us if there�s a war now. Young people today are more bothered about the colour of their mobile phones.� I was going to say �Than what? Indiscriminate killing as part of imperialist war strategies?� but I figured that might not butter any parsnips with his type. I pocketed my cream coloured Nokia and tried to look mean.

The examination was fairly uneventful. A bit of prodding. A bit of poking. A bit of me trying to answer detailed medical questions with the doctor�s arm down my throat up to his elbow. He concluded that there was definitely something but there was �no telling what�. Personally I was holding out for the overactive saliva gland. He told me that I had to go back for scans, and subjected me to some surprise blood tests. There was no mention of any controlled medication, which was disappointing to say the least.

Some weeks later I returned to a different part of the hospital to be scanned like a bag of ready-washed salad through an electronic point of sale. My friend Lara came along to hold my metaphorical and actual hand. I was called through and I lay out as the doctor hooked up the ultrasound and jellied my neck up, just like they do to pregnant women�s stomachs when they produce those pictures where if you�re really good at lying you get to say �Awwwww, I can see the baby�s tiny hands!�.

She had a fairly lengthy footle around with her probe whilst I said things like �It�s actually a bit lower down� and she replied �I know�, and then under her breath probably added �how to do my job, you hapless cretin�. After that I mostly stared at the ceiling and concentrated on being quiet.

After a while, I peeked across to see her scowling at the screen. I thought, either they�re showing reruns of Gwyneth Paltrow�s last film on there, or there�s bad news on the way. I craned my eyes a bit further to try and get a glimpse of the screen. At first I was just glad she hadn�t found a set of four month old triplets in there (�Aww, I can see their tiny hands��) but what I could see was lots of black shadows. Scowling and black shadows.

I lay back and thought �I�m finished�. Oops. Had I just said that out loud? Then I realised it was the doctor. Oh, SHE�D finished. She was looking nervous and I thought perhaps she missed the class at medical school where they do the bit about breaking bad news in a professional manner.

�The ultrasound is showing up something and it�s confirmed my suspicions�� she said as I focussed on not being able to breath. �There�s something obstructing one of your saliva glands that needs further investigation and the operation will be performed by a big purple dragon who lives on magic mountain and his best friend is Maurice the talking cat who drinks blue milk from the space cows�� or at least that�s what she could have said for all I know because after the word �glands� all I could hear was an angelic cacophony exclaiming IT�S NOT CANCER!!!

When all�s said and done, a blocked saliva gland was still going to be no laughing matter. For starters it was going to affect my spitting. I was on the non-critical list, but a major concern was that it would decimate my party trick of being able to do that spurt you sometimes do from under your tongue when you yawn AT WILL � I believe the technical term is �gleeking�. OK, I was never really troubling David Blane with that one in terms of impressiveness, and I doubted that I�d bring it up with the consultant.

But anyway. I was safe. All I had to worry about again was lung cancer, brain tumours and chronic heart failure due to lack of a proper diet. I walked back to my flat � the sun was shining that bit brighter, the traffic fumes were that bit more noxious, and all was well with the world.

Round three of me versus my throatal nubbin was a couple of months later. It required inspection by yet another consultant. This time it was back to the good old days - rubber gloves that tasted of enema half way down your gullet, as opposed to the scary hi-tech of the scanning ward, the wretched lump having stepped down from cancerweight division to defend its benign-paingiving title.

As usual, across from the main entrance, the infirm-welcoming hostelry The Hospital Arms was overflowing with people in various states of alcoholic relief, though they could just as easily have been drowning their sorrows. There was a touching line up of walking frames parked outside the main bar � kind of like Lourdes with a happy hour.

Inside the hospital, there were only several hundred vocally restless people in front of me, and of them, I�d say no more than twenty percent were violently psychotic, baying at invisible demons or barking like bronchitic coyote, so it was much more civilised than usual. I even thought about dropping in for a quick drink at the always-popular Caf� Royale, which served eight different types of coffee to people in dressing gowns. There looked to be some commotion, though, as someone obviously there for a routine exorcism was arguing about their skinny mochachino, so I left it.

I was beckoned in after only twenty minutes wait, only to be told that the results of the ultrasound I had some months ago were still in transit. Apparently, the messenger had to navigate uncharted waters with the file betwixt his teeth, stopping off only at some unspoilt exotic island to learn the ways of the natives. Either that or their fax was broken. Either way, my consultant, the Throat Whisperer was unhappy, reassuringly telling me that there was �going to be a major mistake one of these days�.

The pleasantries out of the way, it was straight in for the manual recap. That familiar taste of rubber � it was like a party on my tongue, and everyone�s invited! I thought about asking him if he�d wear the ribbed ones to enhance my pleasure but felt it was too soon into our relationship. He seemed satisfied that I wasn�t about to cough up a tumour, and sat back to consider our options, which seem to be disappointingly singular in their nature � ie. I had to have the saliva gland out.

He said he�d run some tests, presumably just to make sure we�re not embarking on that �major mistake�, and then it would be under the knife. Before I could ask any more, he was straight in with his �only minor risk of complete lower-facial paralysis�, sneaking it in as an afterthought as I�m about to innocently ask if I need to pack my own jim-jams.

Apparently, there was a tweak of a chance that the surgeon might disturb a nerve that�s the width of a human hair (�So thicker than YOURS,� he added, unnecessarily and rather sarcastically, I thought). If it snapped, well, you could say goodbye to that career in modelling or being understood in shops, that was for damn sure as hiccups.

I asked him what the risk of this actually was and he said he�d done �loads� (it transpired later to be fifteen) and that he �hadn�t KNOWINGLY paralysed anyone YET�. I wondered if he�d paralysed all fifteen and they were just keeping it from him to spare his feelings?

A couple of weeks later we decided to make the arrangements for the operation as son as possible. My consultant was perceptibly hot for this procedure, describing it variously as �lovely� because you (by which I sincerely hoped he meant �he�) �can see all the nerves and muscles�, and �wonderfully anatomical�, though I assumed most operations on humans were, unless you were having your aura removed.

Once again, we went through the risks, and he cited an old ex-cricketer turned TV personality who was the shining model of the worst case scenario and whose speech patterns only slightly resembled those of John Merrick with a Yorkshire accent. The estimated size of the residual scar had grown slightly, as had the outside chance of lower facial paralysis, from �almost never� to �maybe one in forty� but other than that, we were good to go, and I would get to spend four days on a hospital ward doing whatever it is you did on hospital wards.

On relaying the news, my mother, the nurse, was a veritable tidal wave of concern, though most of that seemed to be directed at whether I was in possession of a presentable washbag. I assured her I was, but she seemed insistent on buying me a spare set of pyjamas �in case I vomited everywhere�. My mother is notorious in her irrational lack of faith in my being able to control any of my bodily excreta, and this is just a logical extension of her constant donations to me of diarrhoea medication, which she pushes like an insistent but bowel-conscious ghetto crack dealer.

Anyway, far was it from me to be responsible for sullying the family name by looking shabby in pre-op. Obviously, for generations we�d been people who had the appropriate attire when checking in for a stint on the ward � nighties, moccasin slippers, spare sets of non-vomit drenched pyjamas, you name it, and as my personal hospital visit stylist, my mother was already on the case. The fashion that season turned out to be �substantial but not too elaborate� dressing gowns, a little off the shoulder perhaps, so as not to irritate the infected area. No doubt it was what they were all wearing on the burn units of Paris and the Urology departments of Milan. She also warned me to leave all my valuables at home, as presumably some people are just faking convalescing from major operations and are whipping the watches off your wrist as soon as the anaesthetic kicks in and the consultant turns his back.

Crime, fashion, intrigue and a washbag I�m not ashamed of�now here was a hospital drama that had everything.

The coal face of healthcare actually wasn�t that bad. You were only disturbed every 45 seconds by a syringe-wielding orderly to give blood, or to urinate into a plastic jug, or sweat pure bone marrow into a barely-sterile sponge, but these were vital procedures.

I�d snagged a seat by the window, which was making my cohabitees on the ward, none of them under 70, seethe with envy. At least, that's what I was taking the irregularity of their noisy breathing to mean. I'm not one to boast, but the views of the hospital service entrance were pretty breathaking. We were tagged with wristbands of different colours, my basic white only seemed to get me access to the 'patients only' bathroom, whilst the others were probably a bit more "all areas," though since this probably just meant somewhere with cell-threatening levels of radiation or the catheter-fitting emporia, I wasn�t not too bothered. I was being taken down to the operating theatre first thing the next day.

I was woken at 6:30 am after a refreshing night's sleep of around 45 seconds, punctuated by only the odd half hour of demonic whooping. Still, it was a gentle easing into the day, waking to find an electronic thermometer being rammed into my ear.

Wake up! Time to be put to sleep!

Stripped of my brand new pyjamas, which my mum would be proudd to find I hadn't vomited all over, I was dolled up in one of those gowns that shows off your arse to all and sundry and an undeniably fruity paper hat. A whistling porter wheeled me down to theatre, and, more importantly, the drugs. James Spader was evidently moonlighting as an anesthesiologist and we chatted for a while as if this was a perfectly normal social situation. I told him I dabbled in travel writing and he suggested, as he inserted the drip into the back of my hand, that I wrote about this place because the painkiller he's about to administer would send me �on the best fucking trip I�d have all year.� Suddenly I'm being dosed up by William Burroughs. True to his word, some seconds later I had a sudden urge to listen to melodic house music.

My prankster of a surgeon came in to mark me up and, much to his own personal amusement, wrote "Cut Here" in big letters on my neck. The stream of jokes seemingly endless, I heard him quip, "Time for my pre-surgery shot of whiskey!" as he left to scrub up.

Then came the knock-out juice. The last words I heard were "put yourself in a nice place," and thankfully, not "So what are we doing again exactly?" and 3.7 seconds later, I'm out.

I woke up in the recovery room with an immediate sense of disappointment that the pre-med had worn off and being barked at to �breath deeply�, which seemed like a lot of unnecessary effort, so I drifted back to sleep. Apparently I had a relatively animated discussion with the porter who wheeled me back to the ward, along the lines of me shouting out �How big is the scar?� and him being reticent to tell me and getting tired of my repeated pleading, though since it was swathed in about 40 square metres of gauze dressing, and he had no way of seeing it, you could understand his eventual testiness.

I spent the afternoon nonchalantly slipping in and out of consciousness, only being woken at one point by the jester surgeon asking me to blow him a kiss. I thought perhaps I was delirious, but it was his way of checking that he, and more importantly I, had avoided that whole lower facial paralysis scenario. I did have that post-dental lip feeling, though, where it feels like a small and unmanoeuvrable dinghy and made even drinking tea a more dribbly exercise than it usually is. Cursory damage assessment revealed a lower jaw that felt like it had had a picture hook drilled into it and a tube coming out of my neck whose sole purpose was to slowly vacuum out any spare blood, along with anything else that felt like being sucked out of my insides, into a jar, which I had to carry around with me for two days. Not the most dignified of activities.

The next two days were spent in stasis, my only distraction apart from the people who visited me, being the ongoing flatulence battle of my co-patients, rampant throughout the day as they jousted to have the most disgusting medical procedures performed on them (�I�ll see your bedside bowel movement and raise you a catheter replacement!�). At night, the noises would be emitted over the ether like the last gassy emission of a slowly-petrifying mollusc welling up over several decades through a stinking prehistoric tar pit. The man next to me would swear himself to sleep.

Weirdly, all the doctors appeared to be blonde thirty year old females, and so morning rounds were like a medically-themed covershoot for Cosmopolitan or something. I was never paid much attention � they probably just thought I looked REALLY good for seventy years old. All I had to do was lie there and knock back my decidedly substandard painkillers - once you�ve have morphine derivatives, can you ever truly go back?. The rest of my stay was, in any case, uneventful, apart from the extraction of my blood-letting fashion accessory, which felt like they were slowly unwinding the arteries around my throat (you have to be awake for it) and left a slightly larger than pinhole gap in my neck. Which was nice.

The roof of my mouth is still very delicate, meaning I have to negotiate food with caution. For lunch, I wisely chose lava-hot carrot soup and a baguette that was crusty in the way that the earth�s outer mantle is crusty. It was like trying to digest an active volcano. In the end, I had to make do with scooping out the filling of the baguette, optimistically called �Chicken Supreme�, though I would be the first to question its supremacy. I left the soup to cool, though it apparently came in a cup that had been developed up by NASA to retain heat in the furthest reaches of space, and I was almost ready to leave by the time the bubbling liquid had reached a temperature not used in nuclear fission. I hope I�m not scarred for life or my diet is going to have to consist of pureed vegetables and ice.

Now I�m home with unsightly stitches and nothing to do. I feel worn out considering I�ve just laid on my back for three days. I miss my gland. I keep having thoughts that maybe we should try again. I can change. We can both change. But maybe now it�s just too late.

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