The Rose' Resumption

Disclaimer: There’s every possibility that for any newbie readers, this entry will contain significant levels of over-sharing. If you want to avoid images that will haunt you, or you want to be able to look me in the eye again, move right the hell along and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Are they gone? OK, anyone left, buckle up.

Over the course of a life where I’m slowly – and mercifully much more slowly than some of my friends (Lori Y, I’m looking particularly at you over the rim of my spectacles here) – accumulating hospital visits and essentially Shit That’s Gone Wrong With Me, I’ve had a couple of deeply unpleasant experiences.

·         First spiral fracture of my femur, bone popping up through the skin, left to cope overnight, aged 8 – not so much with the fun times.

·         Battered to fuck one New Year’s Eve, orthopaedic surgery on New Year’s Day to rebuild the left ankle – could have done without.

·         Waking up deaf in one ear and dizzy as hell one morning, then having to do a full conference – not something I’m eager to repeat, not least because the deafness turned out to be permanent, and I only have the one ear left.

But of all my medical funfests, the worst, the categorically, unequivocally worst, was a few years ago.

It all began, as these things do, in Scotland, at the wedding of our friends Mary and Alan. I’d known them since journo school, where Mary had been on my course, my breakfast radio shift and my wavelength when it came to Teletubbies and funny squirrels (don’t ask, long story). Now they were getting married, and we went up to Scotland to celebrate with them. There was fun, there was scenery, there was tablet (for the uninitiated, tablet is what happens when you cram more sugar into any single molecule than is currently possible according to traditional physics…and then introduce it to butter), there was cranachan, (which is what happens when a bunch of hairy-arsed Scotsmen swarmed down to Eton, kicked the pupils’ heads in and stole their Mess), there was, that weekend, insane heat, there was moderately obligatory Scottish country dancing and there was a pretty darned good time had by all. In the middle of the night, as is often the way after a good time has been had by all, I got up to pee. It was one of those nights when you try and convince yourself you’re not really awake yet, and everything happens by remote control, will as little in the way of open eyes as possible.

I opened one eye though, because, not to put too fine a point on it, I’m a dabber, not a shaker, and that’s not a manoeuvre you can pull off with both eyes closed in a strange bathroom.

The message went from the open eye to the brain: Error. There has been a bio-error. Second eye required for confirmation of assessment.

My second eye blinked wearily open, sending its own message that there would be hell to pay if it had to stay that way for any length of time.

I blinked.

That wasn’t right. The bowl was filled with what could only really be described as rose’.

I dabbed. Claret. Diluted in the water to make rose’.

There’s nothing quite as guaranteed to ensure you don’t sleep any more as the discovery that you’re bleeding from somewhere you shouldn’t be bleeding from, and, which was at least as weird, that it didn’t hurt at all.

When we got back home, I rationalized it away, but it would happen (if you’ll excuse the unintentional pun) periodically, and I mentioned it to d. Which is how I came to have had a whole range of tests on my kidneys, my bladder and my whole urinary tract – all of which said, essentially ‘nothing to see here.’ People familiar with my heart shenanigans will not be surprised by that. My body appears to be demand a Poirot, a Holmes, or a Marple to figure out its peculiarities.

The ‘nothing to see here’ nature of my (again, apologies) issue was what eventually led me to be laying in a sort of side-room at the hospital, in a stupid-ass gown, with my dick in the hands of three strangers – a state of affairs I can honestly say had not occurred for quite some years.

That they were looking at it quite so disparagingly was a first though. When they tried to stick a tube down it, the day got significantly worse than it had been up till that point. The words ‘You have got to be fucking kidding me!’ leapt, unbidden from my lips. Quite the most uncomfortable I’d ever felt in my life to that point – and oh yeah, that includes the sensation of a camera snaking its way from my wrist to my heart and back during an angiogram, now I remember it.

When they discovered that, apparently, my urethra was narrower than the tube they were trying to shove into it, they withdrew the tube with a peremptory huffiness that I felt was unwarranted on their part. And it was at that point that I heard the line that still haunts my occasional waking nightmares.

‘We’re gonna need the Wide Bore and The Spreader.’

Seriously, when they’d already tried to shove something bigger than me…into me, their solution was to Widen The Fuck Out Of Me.

‘Seriously, stop this now,’ I begged. ‘I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

They didn’t appear to have a sense of humour between them, and so the Wide Bore and The Spreader were introduced to both my life and my body in a way that disinclined me to be friends with either the equipment or the people who wielded it (I use the word ‘wielded’ advisedly). They found precisely nothing wrong with me – which considering what they’d had to do to come to that conclusion I found pretty bloody astonishing. Especially since, having had the Wide Bore and The Spreader inside me, I was peeing rose’ almost immediately on leaving the room.

Now, I know of course that to any women reading this – and most of my readers seem to be women (social comment on the inherent sexism of body image and weightloss, much? Or do I just have more female friends?), all of this is pretty much a case for one raised eyebrow and a ‘So what? Toughen up, little soldier, you don’t know you’re born.’ And this of course is true. The only reason I assault your eyeballs and brains with it at all is because the only vague conclusions they came to was that a) I have a ‘Platinum-grade pair of kidneys’ – seriously, if you’re an organ-harvester looking to make a quick buck, go for the kidneys, as it turns out my best feature is my offal. And that I have a teeny urethra. I know, I know, they say size doesn’t matter. Matters to me, as what happens is if I pee at what could be called ‘full force’ I rupture something. And bleed, and suffer intermittent hellacious burning sensations akin, I gather, to the joy of prostate trouble. And then, after a while, it heals, and life goes on as normal.

And a couple of days ago, I happened to cough, mid-pee. Nevertheless, I’ve been sparklingly rose-free. Except today I started taking my blood-thinner. And tonight, at dinner, I popped up to the bathroom at Carluccio’s.

I’d sort of been expecting the rose’. Annnnd there it was.

No pain though, like the first time, and nothing subsequently. But now I’m left wondering whether this evening was down to the cough a couple of days ago, or whether it’s just coincidence that the day I start taking the blood-thinners – with their frank warnings that the side effects can include this kind of bleeding – is the first day I see the rose’ in quite some time. And the irrational, illogical fear occurs to me – I was sort of expecting the rose’, because it’s a case of unusual bleeding with which I am familiar. But what if there are things in my body that have never presented me with evidence of their crankiness, that now have extra-sloshy blood running through them…?

Ultimately, there’s nothing to be done about it at the moment – will keep on going with the blood-thinners (not least because they also come with a dire warning to NOT STOP TAKING THEM WITHOUT YOUR DOCTOR’S ADVICE), and see what happens. Still, this evening was an unwelcome resumption, and I will spend a ridiculous amount of time over the next 24 hours dabbing, just to catch myself unawares. I promise not to report on it ever again though! Unless there’s something deeply pertinent to say, obviously…

In Disappearing terms, a reasonably good day – two porridges, no lake walking, quite a few skinny coffees and one two-course Italian meal, followed by 300 calories of biking to add to the 344 walked calories of just getting from place to place (enough to discount both porridges and maybe a coffee or two). It’s also occurred to me that as we go away on Saturday, and even I’m not sad enough to take my Nazi Scales on holiday with me, we’ll all miss the breathtaking excitement of Tuesday’s weigh-in.

Gee… how will we all cope?