Glum.

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Today I had a camera rammed up the jap’s eye. Every male reader has now crossed his legs or at least clamped them together. Quite right too, it is a remarkably unpleasant experience.

I have seen the inside of my own bladder, something nobody should ever see. On the plus side, after 54 years of permanent dampness, it is in perfect condition. Not even a trace of rust around the seams. I am lumpless still. It drives the NHS mad.

Some weeks back I fell over, cracked two ribs and bashed a kidney. The pain was rather a lot. I peed blood and even exuded a blood clot the size and shape of a ureter. After five days of it I gave in and phoned the medics. By this time the pee-blood had stopped.

Okay, it is fair to say the original injuries were drink-related. I was plastered and felt nothing until the following morning. Anyway, I ended up staying ovenight in hosptal where they X-rayed and CT-scanned me and found nothing important damaged. So I went home and did what I did last time I cracked a rib (it’s not in their records, I didn’t tell them about that one). I took it carefully until the ends fused back together. It still twinges now and then but that is only to be expected.

Then I had a letter telling me my bladder-scan was booked. This was news to me. Nobody mentioned any follow-up. Well, I thought, I have passed the half-century so birthdays are counting down now. The chance of something going wrong must be increasing daily. So I went along. What the hell, I’ve paid enough into the NHS and have just had my second overnight stay for 28 years. Might as well start accumulating my money’s worth. It’ll take more years  than I have left.

I was lectured on lifestyle by people who didn’t exist 28  years ago. Life? Don’t talk to me about life. I’ve been doing it twice as long as you have. It’s not as much fun as you think it will be, but it used to be. You missed the good stuff. All you have left is drone life.

Anyway, today was KnobCam day. I faced a humourless consultant and a very pretty nurse. Under normal circumstances the nurse would have had a libido effect but one look ar the camera and the first ever touch of a not-mine male hand on that part and it retracted like snapped elastic. I’m surprised he could even find it.

He did though and he poked in the camera. It didn’t take long. It must have had no more than an inch left to go.

Once again, there is nothing wrong with me. Despite the pre-cam lecture that smoking causes bladder cancer (the joke that I don’t stuff it with baccy and smoke it like a pipe was a waste), despite the warnings that booze makes your pee-bag lumpy (evidence-free medicine again, the gourd-shakers run the NHS now), mine is in perfect health. I can pee free, knowing that the little waterbag is working as it should.

As is the rest of me. I ignore all NHS and stupid-bastard food fundamentalist diktats.

Those who follow them all, those who entirely trust the medical world, all too often end up like this.

There is more and deeper to al this but tonight I have a numb knob and am in full sad-puppy mode. Also well into whisky painkiller tonight.

 

More on this later, although don’t expect any willie jokes for a while…

32 thoughts on “Glum.”

  1. NHS medicos with a sense of hunour are as rare as hens’ teeth, so no need to worry about that. And they found the little chap – the shrinking violet – so they have some knowledge of anatomy and you escaped an NHS establishment with your life, so all-in-all a good result?

    It’s over 20 years since my last overnight stay in hospital. That was painful. I had a pus-filled abscess removed round the other side – just above my butt crack (what’s the correct term, so as not to appear so coarse and ill-educated in future?). At least I had nurses round at the house for a few months to change the dressings in the resultant rather large hole until it had built up flesh again.

    Anyway, enough about your willy-not-wonky and my chocolate factory.

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    • “NHS medicos with a sense of hunour are as rare as hens’ teeth..”

      Accompanying my mother to a consultation for a lumpectomy, she was worried about the dye they’d introduce (as a similar one for an eye scan turned her face bright orange) & the consultant assured her is shouldn’t be the same, though her breast would be bright blue. ‘That’s OK’, she said, ‘I don’t plan to show those in Tesco!’.

      ‘My dear’, said the consultant, ‘That’s Tesco’s loss..’ 🙂

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  2. On the day you turn 60 years of age, those medico people will start treating you a lot differently, and not better! They will start poking and probing you, using the vast insturment collection they have at their disopal, (someone has to justify it) if you even come in complaining of a zit. I am personally going through this now. I went to my eye surgeon to have my second eyeball cataract done, (the first was done 2 years ago without event) and I have been put through the loop trying to get this done, seeing lung doctors, heart doctors, having fifty tests. Frankly, I am suprised they did not try to poke out my scotum as well. I just want to be able to see again!! But it just does not work that way anymore, I am told. You have to OBEY or you will never get what you came in to have fixed. My, what a nasty existence these young things have created…

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  4. I note the kidney story mentions ‘alcoholic’ in the URL (and alcohol features prominently in the story,) but the _actual_ problem with the kidneys was they were infested with parasites…

    He was probably a smoker as well…

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  5. I went to the docs a few years back and he shoved a digit up my arse. At least he used a glove and lube. Today they can do a blood test which removes the need for anal probing (alien abductees excepted). Although apparently you can still opt in for a ‘fingering’ (shudder). What I don’t understand is, that I only went in, originally, because I had a cold (shudder).

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    • That reminds me of a joke I wrote for Tim Vine (I wrote it on his Facebook page and he ‘liked’ it):

      I went to my doctor and he said, “What’s the matter, Tim?”

      I said, “Two things. I have haemorrhoids and my eyesight is getting worse.”

      So, the doctor says, “How many fingers do I have up?”

      And I said, “It’s difficult to tell. Now, what about my eyesight?”

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      • I remember that campaign. It had an image of a very, very large glove.

        The PSA antigen test has been around a while. There’s no real need to poke fingers up bottoms. I think they just enjoy it.

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  6. Good man, well done, glad it’s clear. This happened to me. For your readers’ info the “microfibre” camera is much heftier than a motorcycle clutch cable, in fact it approaches ballpoint pen diameter. The Doc said that I might experience “slight discomfort”. Humph! It was painful and terrible, like being bayonetted. He said that my vocabulary was, at this juncture, most extensive.
    It’s better than having an untreated tumor I suppose but it was such an unpleasant experience. I would be tempted to wait for any future problem to go away until it’s too late.

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  7. Well, I thought, I have passed the half-century so birthdays are counting down now. The chance of something going wrong must be increasing daily. ”

    Perhaps.
    USA data- bladder cancer incidence rate is 2/10,000 per year.

    Did your doctor mention that there was a 99.98% probability that nothing of interest would be found?

    Lifetime risk is 2.4%….odds are 41-1 against your getting such a cancer.

    Only 1 in 5,000 such tortures, per year, show a cancer.

    If he charges the NHS a rate of $(US)100 per exam, it costs $500,000 per positive diagnosis.

    If he did 4 exams per day, he would have 1 positive exam every 5 years.

    The thought of the harm caused by ‘false’ positives is scary.
    A biopsy proceedure would be very nasty.

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  10. Screening doesn’t seem to work. Far too many false positives and of course the people that suggested screening would be good tell us that the way they’ve rolled them out isn’t how they were supposed to be done. But of course it’s become an industry now, people get paid to do them and Docs tick a box when they do one and then send in an invoice to the Government for payment.

    Health people should carry a health warning.

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    • They even get paid for blood pressure and cholesterol tests. That’s why I keep getting those invites to go to the surgery so they can find something wrong with me.

      I couldn’t go. I wasn’t well.

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  11. In ‘woman’s world’, we’ve been hearing reports of doctors applying the ‘precautionary principle’ wrt breast cancer and just lopping them off unnecessarily… beware!

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    • They’ve been doing that for a while, based on a gene test that says a woman ‘is more likely to’ get breast cancer. I’d have thought it better to warn those at high risk and have them visit the doc for a check every six months or so, rather than wade in with the knife.

      Even if you’re 99% certain to get a particular cancer because of your genetics, that still isn’t 100% certain.

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  12. My hubby’s uro. consultant cracked a smile when he asked if my hubby had trouble ‘passing water’. Hubby replied ‘only when I walk along the Embankment’. In true ‘Del Boy’ style.

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