On Sunday what I thought was going to be be brief visit to my local GP out of hours service ended up with an immediate admission to hospital.

Even after I’d been put on a ward I expected no more than overnight observation and then perhaps a follow up appointment with my GU Consultant.

Unfortunately my “water works” decided to shut down so on Monday morning I found myself catheterised and effectively imprisoned in bed.

On Monday afternoon an ultra sound scan showed that I didn’t, as feared, have an inguinal hernia, so at least I didn’t need emergency surgery but it did show that the attempted removal of the varicocele last Wednesday had only been approximately 50% successful and that there was a large blood clot in the remaining part.

If things go according to plan then this clot should dissipate of its own accord and the problem will eventually go away. It has to be said that my history doesn’t bode well for things going according to plan.

I finally got home at about 3pm today (Wednesday) and am hoping against hope that I won’t have to suddenly go back.

Further tales from the list of facts will be told starting tomorrow after the current fog of morphine and similar drugs has cleared.

Love

It was my first experience of undergoing surgery while still awake, although quite heavily sedated, and it was very strange listening to the surgeon and the radiographer discussing what they were doing.

I was hoping that I’d be able to watch but the monitors were obviously set up for the surgeon rather than for my benefit and I couldn’t see.

I don’t think it’s particularly weird that I wanted to watch, apart from being quite fascinating to a former nurse, it would have been nice to see that unpleasant reminder of a traumatised adolescence disappearing.

Now, onto other matters.

When I published my list of odd facts about me a while ago, several people commented that there were items on that list that suggested much broader stories explaining them.

I agree and so I’m going to spend the next few posts expanding some of those facts to give a broader picture of the little oddity that was Malcolm (aka Malc & Mac) McLachlan.

Some of the stories are quite funny, some of them are fairly unhappy and several of them, in the best traditions of drama, are a mixture of both.

I may have had to put up with more than my fair share of problems as a child and a teenager but one thing I can never complain about is that my life was ever dull.

Coming up next then is number 7 on the list which is a story I did tell quite a while ago but it bears revisiting as it really is quite funny. It wasn’t funny when it happened, at least not to me, but eventually I managed to laugh about it.

Love

It seemed that I was the victim of serious disinformation as far as procedures went. I was there to have my knees looked at so being told to get rid of the gown before climbing up on to the examination couch was, shall we say, surprising. I didn’t dare refuse of course, the nurse had already made sure that my obedience would be automatic.

I’ve been accused of a certain level of naiveté where my many medical investigations as a child were concerned. I’ll admit that none of my contemporaries ever seemed to be investigated quite so thoroughly as I almost always was and most of them were surprised at the level of undress I always seemed to experience. I prefer to think that I was lucky in having doctors who took a holistic view of my problems. It’s my head and if I want to bury it in the sand that’s my prerogative.

Apparently knees were related to everything else, at least that’s what I had to assume as he started at my neck and worked his way down. On his way he made two comments that did little to restore any of my self esteem.

In the first place he commented that I was “just a bag of bones, no wonder I had joint problems”. Being asked if I was eating properly was deeply insulting to Mum. I had an incredibly healthy appetite which Mum often struggled to keep up with, I just couldn’t gain weight. The implied neglect made me very angry.

The second, and much more hurtful, comment was the observation that I was “rather under developed for a fifteen year old”. Yes, I was fully aware of that fact, thank you. I faced the empirical evidence every time I was in the changing room at school, how nice of an orthopaedic consultant to point it out.

On his way down my body he muttered something about scoliosis which was a new one on me and , as he offered no explanation, was going to need looking up when I got home.

Eventually he made it to my knees which were, after all, the reason I was there putting up with his attention. Another session of ridiculous leg bending with silly questions like “does this hurt?”

Of course it damn’ well hurt! The human knee isn’t supposed achieve some of the positions he forced mine into. Eventually he was satisfied that he’d tortured me sufficiently and allowed me to recover the precarious dignity of the gown.

Then he simply told me that I could go, without a single word about what he had or hadn’t discovered. I was livid! If Mum had been there with me he’d have told her, talking as if I wasn’t even in the room, but at least I’d have heard everything for myself. It seemed that I was grown up enough to attend hospital unaccompanied but was too young to be trusted with the diagnosis.

I tried to ask for an explanation but was just airily waved away with the dismissive comment “Oh, it’s probably just growing pains, I’ll write to your doctor so get your Mother to take you to see him in a couple of weeks.” With that I had to be content.

Returning to the cubicle I hurriedly dressed and made my very dejected way out of the hospital straight back to the bus station. I’d been going to explore Chichester a bit, possibly stopping for a wander round the cathedral but I was so upset that I just got the first bus back to Midhurst.

It was too late to join the last period so I went to the library and brooded for a while. I was glad when the final bell went and I could get on the coach, grumpily ignore everyone and go home.

Complaining to Mum about how unfair everything was got me absolutely no sympathy. She approved of the Consultant’s behaviour and reminded me that I was still a child. Petulantly demanding to know why I’d been sent on my own then just brought the threat of punishment so I moodily stumped upstairs to do my prep and practice on my two instruments.

I still didn’t know if I’d be playing rugby come September.

Love

“What?” I squeaked “Everything?”.

“Yes, everything now get a move on!”

“But I’m only having my knees looked at, why?”

“Just do as you’re told, please.”

Now very unhappy I locked myself in the cubicle and stripped to my skin to put on one of those lovely hospital gowns that leave your arse bare for all the world to see. I’d hardly got the beastly thing on when there was a rap on the other door and the nurse’s voice demanded to know if I was ready yet.

Clutching the gown closed behind me I opened the door to be led off to the X-Ray department. Even though we had annual chest x-rays at school, courtesy of a mobile unit, one was taken anyway, standard procedure in those days. If you were in an x-ray department you got a chest x-ray taken as well as the ones you were actually there for.

That out of the way I spent the next half an hour having both legs bent into almost impossible positions then x-rayed from assorted angles. By the time I was allowed to get off the table I could barely walk, I wanted my Mum so badly just then.

After a long wait while the Radiographer checked that all the films were OK I was collected by the nurse and led off to another waiting room to sit and wait to see the Consultant.

Just to add to my woes I was expected to carry the huge pile of x-rays, it wouldn’t do for a lady, the nurse, to carry anything while there was a boy available for the task now would it? Needing two hands for the task I could no longer protect my dignity by holding the gown closed.

In retrospect it’s quite funny that at 15 I should have been so coy about anyone seeing my bottom, a couple of years into the future and I’d be cheerfully showing it off all over Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire much to the delight of quite a few men.

Looking round I couldn’t help but notice that I was the only one in such an advanced state of undress and that I was also the youngest person in the room by a very long way.

I suppose I should have been grateful that I was being seen in an adult clinic, if I’d been treated as a paediatric case, which would normally have happened at just 15, I’d have probably found myself wearing a gown with teddy bears printed on it.

Small mercies, Malcolm, always be thankful for small mercies.

Love

The rest of the Easter holiday just drifted by, beyond my music I had no real interests to keep me busy and before I knew it school had started again.

The next event of any real note was my appointment at the orthopaedic clinic and even before the day arrived things started to go wrong.

Dad suddenly announced that he couldn’t get a shift change for the day in question so he couldn’t drive me to Chichester with Mum, which had been the plan all along. The decision was made that at 15 I should be grown up enough to take care of myself and could attend hospital alone.

Er… OK, I could do that I supposed although I was very nervous of the idea. This wasn’t like going to the GP’s surgery where everybody had known me since I was 3 and always called me by my first name, this was a major hospital and everybody would be a complete stranger.

There was an upside however, getting out of school after second period so that I could get the bus to Chichester. Mum gave me money for the bus fare and a “little extra” so that I could get myself a cup of tea and something to eat after my appointment.

On the day I gave a letter from Mum to my Form Master, showed him the appointment letter and got a very genuine good luck wish which made me feel a little better about the whole thing. Delighted at the thought of almost an entire day out of school I made my way to the bus.

Well, if I was grown up enough to attend hospital on my own then I was grown up enough to sit on the top deck and smoke myself into near nausea, so I did but didn’t actually quite reach the embarrassing moment of puking all over the other passengers.

Having been worried silly about being late for my appointment I actually arrived almost an hour early and settled into a corner of the waiting room to get a head start on some prep. When my name was finally called over the tannoy I hurriedly put my books away and got up to face a stern looking nurse who barked ‘follow me’ and strode off down the corridor leaving me to trail along behind her like an obedient puppy.

What happened next is a tale all by itself which I’ll tell next time.

On Monday an old medical problem reasserted itself and at 4pm I found myself in the A & E Department of my local hospital. In the past this problem has been quite straightforward, go to A & E, get admitted, have surgery sometime around midnight and be let out the following afternoon.

This time, however, things didn’t quite go to plan and I eventually went down to theatre at 11:30am on Wednesday. In all that time I was allowed to eat one sandwich and was given a cup of coffee and a cup of hot chocolate.

Having finally had surgery and got over the anaesthetic, with a drastic drop in blood pressure and a completely unexpected loss of core temperature, I was finally seen by the consultant at about 8pm and told that I had to stay in to have an MRI scan on Friday afternoon.

I eventually escaped at 7:30pm on Friday evening and made my way home to be reunited with Gary and Kyril.

So, what I’d expected to be a day’s absence became almost a week and I was getting quite worried at one point that they were going to keep me in over the weekend as well.

This is about the twelfth operation I’ve had on this particular bit of me and the problem isn’t actually curable so it’ll happen again and again.

Thinking about it I hope that raping me when I was 19 was the best shag that a certain person ever had. That would be some small compensation for the operations I’ve been put through.