Fashionably late to the ball...

Not wanting to appear too eager about 2012, I'm starting it a week after everyone else. So a Happy New Year to you (even to my 'unwanted but inexplicably persistent' reader from up the road - see October 10 2011 - you just can't keep away, can you?). The messages left after my last post were exceptionally kind.

So let's get the ill-health stuff out of the way before resuming the idiocy. I promise to keep it free of gore, and for added value there is a small cautionary tale involved for anyone who might need the services of their local hospital one day. The moral of my tale is  "ask lots of questions, and don't waste time trying to get your consultant to like you." Had I wasted time not doing the former and doing the latter, I would almost certainly not have got off with the relatively minor surgery I underwent last week - I'd still be laid up in bed, either a hospital one or my own, with big bits of me missing and weeks of recovery ahead, rather than back at work slightly tired and a little sore, but well and truly on the mend.

I've never had much to do with hospitals as a patient, and though I've worked in a few the jobs tended to be in secondary care units attached to Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology departments, so well away from the stethoscope- swinging, nodule-palpating end. And I've had very little contact indeed with actual surgeons. Nonetheless as a veteran of fifteen years' NHS service, I did feel fairly confident when I was first referred into 'the system' that I would be skilled and adept at working my way though it, knowing instinctively which questions to ask, and that I would easily build up a mutually respectful rapport with my consultant within which concerns could be aired, heard and discussed in an intelligent, clear and concise manner.

All that confidence evaporated in a matter of weeks, during which time I saw at least five different doctors, the first of them a Junior Registrar whose bedside manner consisted of repeating the word 'faaaantassssstic!' very loudly to each question I answered, even my name, and who aroused my personal ire by calling over my shoulder to my hubby (who'd come with me to the initial appointment) 'don't worry! I'll make sure I bring her back!"( I'm sorry...??). With every doctor I saw, the scale of what they proposed to 'do' to me got heavier and heavier, but the justifications got lighter and lighter, until the end-game argument which amounted to something like "we think you should have some radical surgery that will mean three months off work, not because your  actual condition is life threatening but because at some future point you might get a life-threatening condition, even though nothing in the tests we've done indicate there's anything like that going on." When my chuckling consultant introduced me to his student as "the lady I told you about, the one who doesn't like surgery" (oddly, I've yet to meet my nemesis, the "lady who can't get enough bits cut off her", though I am sure she's out there somewhere, bouncing around the Munchausen's scale) I felt all my hope and fight drain away, and knew I was not going to get out of his theatre without leaving some of my very self in the sluice - and not just the bit that wasn't working. As I bargained with  him about maybe taking this but leaving that, I could all but hear the clink of metal on metal from under the desk as he metaphorically sharpened his knives. I came out feeling that I'd done quite well to get away with a moderate amount of interference, and that though I was in for some pain and lost income, it would have to be worth it and at least it would just get the damn thing over.

So when an earlier appointment came up which meant travelling to a different hospital twenty miles away last week, I grabbed it with both hands. I felt incredible relief - not only had I managed to beat the surgeon down from his original plan to disembowel me, I was getting in almost three weeks early. What could be better? Though the designated morning was foul, with a huge angry storm raging right across the South of England, I was happy to make my way around the fallen trees and debris at 6.30am to the slowly-waking hospital where post Christmas staff were greeting each other and comparing their New Year weight gain as they checked the patients in. I was on the lookout for my consultant, who I was sure would be roaming the corridors like Sweeney Todd, stropping a razor thoughtfully on a leather strap in preparation for a good morning's cutting and chopping. I put on my tasteful backless hospital gown, climbed into bed, and waited.

When a small, confident woman in surgical scrubs put her head round the screen an hour later, I assumed she was looking for someone else. But there was my name on her list, and she was holding that list because she was the surgeon conducting all the procedures in Theatre 2 that morning. Only she wanted a word with me first. She couldn't understand why Sweeney Todd had opted to remove quite as much as he had. Was there some new information about my condition that she wasn't aware of? Because if there wasn't, it seemed most sensible to her to restrict the procedure to one which would deal with the actual original problem that my GP had found in the first place, back in June, have a look around, and if there were no other problems, to leave everything else alone. How would I feel about that?

How would I feel? I felt like kissing her. And so it was that I left hospital that evening, walking like a dowager and out of my mind on morphine to be sure, but with the 'problem' removed and all other anatomical parts still sitting snugly in my abdominal cavity where they belong. I spent much of last week asleep or watching crap TV under a slanket, but compared to what I thought I was in for, and thanks to this amazing, intelligent woman, I've got off lightly. What I'm left with is immense gratitude to her, but a certain residue of despair that the likes of Sweeney Todd are still roaming the corridors of, one presumes, many a hospital, looking for things to chop. As a friend who's a nurse told me some time ago, "you have to watch it with some surgeons. They're born to cut, and if they don't get maximum cutting value out of every intervention, they end up feeling that their time's been wasted." It's great to know there are other kinds of doctor out there, but disturbing to know that your chances of getting one may come down to simple factors like who's on the theatre rota on any given day. It could all have gone so differently. So, if you find yourself in a similar situation, don't be scared to ask question after question about why certain clinical decisions are being made. It was my body all along, but for a good few weeks there it certainly didn't feel like it.

Now, on with 2012. Doesn't it feel different from 2011? No? Oh.