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Not even the NHS can kill me.
I'm a special boy with a special gall-bladder. Or I was up until the point at which it was cut out of me. Although the bladder itself came out in bits, preventing me from pickling it and bringing it round to dinner parties, the doctors were kind enough to leave me with this souvenir, the source of my woe.
They also left me with internal bleeding, which I discovered several hours after being happily discharged thanks to a combination of body-wrecking agony and copious vomiting. A&E were obliging enough to pop me back open again, drain the litre of blood sloshing around my belly, and tie up any loose, spurting ends.
The experience has convinced me to embark on a self-denying eternity of healthy living in order to decrease the chances of ever returning to hospital. The punishments for debauched lifestyles really are quite astoundingly horrible: there were people on my ward who ate through tubes inserted into their bellies. Most were carrying bags of their own effluent around with them.
One guy next to me, a grotesque Yorkshireman who resembled a semi-molten waxwork manatee, had just had part of his bowels removed, thanks to the five-pint-a-day average he'd kept up for the previous 60 years. I might have found his lack of contrition charmingly roguish if he hadn't kept spluttering pungent, Bovril-scented shits into a sack a metre and a half from my head. This offence was aggravated by his chipper attitude towards his predicament. “Oh I'm champion, just champion,” he would say when asked – but then, thanks to an oxygen feed, he didn't have to smell his colostomy bag.
Wait until the epidural wears off, you useless amoeba-shaped tax-burden, I shrieked, before upending his gurney and sending his rolypoly body to hit the floor with a loud splap. Except I didn't. I would have burst my stitches.
Martin
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