Saturday 02/04/11

March was pretty boring. I got a year older and the ageing process upped a gear. I spent the first week of my 24th year of life off sick and one of those days was spent in hospital with all the other geriatrics. I don’t know anyone who succumbs to disease as much as I seem to and given the increasing rate of illness I’m experiencing, everyone else is going to have to catch up.

My trip to hospital wasn’t directly caused by illness, actually.

As normal as any other evening, my mates were round and we were playing Fifa. Mid game I started to feel unwell (caused, I subsequently discovered, by a virus I'd caught). I paused the game, legged it from the sofa to the bathroom and emptied the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl. By the third wretch, however, there was no food coming out any more, only blood. Aside from the nasty Texas Chainsaw look to my bathroom this caused, I didn’t immediately consider it and was only grateful that I wasn’t nauseous any more.

Bush and Freeman made their excuses and left (I think they were slightly offended at my inaccuracy – I had spewed blood over as much of the floor as the toilet). Feeling empty and, I recall, much healthier, I decided to check NHS direct to see if puking blood was indicative of anything dodgy. It turns out it was and so I put my coat on and made the short trip to Wycombe Hospital A&E. I got put on a bed (for lack of a better word) and had my blood pressure checked about a billion times.

Since I’ve got arms like Mr Burns, though sadly not as much money as him to allow me to go private, it was easy for the nurses and doctors to find suitable veins to prod, poke and penetrate. And it seems that if you’ve got easily accessible veins, they’ll make the most of it. I had half a dozen sacks of saline hooked up to a drip, multiple blood tests taken and all manner of painkillers and sedatives pumped into my arms. Bear in mind I was only in hospital for about 18 hours, this is an incredible amount of bother to be put through in such a short period of time.

The worst thing, and I imagine the most unpleasant medical procedure anybody could be put through, was the endoscopy which is when a camera is used to see inside your body. They wanted to have a look at my stomach, to make sure it wasn’t bleeding and I didn’t have a life threatening ulcer, so they numbed my mouth and throat, gave me a sedative and proceeded to force a half inch thick cable down my throat to have a look around my glorious insides – my oesophagus, stomach and duodenum (which is my favourite word).

It was truly horrible. I couldn’t stop wretching from my gut, my gag reflex had given up since the back of my throat had been forced open. I don’t know how sword swallowers do it. My sinuses dispelled any of their contents so my nose and mouth became drowned in snot and dribble. A nurse with a suction hose poked it around my mouth to clear the mucus, like a cross between a dental assistant and office cleaner, to allow me to breathe again. And this is a procedure that takes only 5 minutes. It’s like injury time at the Emirates.

Thankfully for me, there was no damage to my stomach, only a couple of cuts to my oesophagus, which repairs itself. One of the cuts was caused by the strength of my wretching when I was originally sick. The other was caused by the endoscopy itself, the cable had nicked the inside of my food pipe and caused as much damage as it was designed to see. But curse me if I hadn’t already signed the waiver, absolving Wycombe Hospital of any blame.

I went home later that day. I was fine, I didn’t even have a real problem, just a minor viral illness, but I’ll allow myself the freedom to make it seem as though it was a genuine medical scare. I had better be careful in my old age.