Back in hospital this afternoon; I seem to have become addicted to the place. It’s all M’s fault. She started the habit, with her annual hip replacements, and now I’ve picked it up.
Amusingly, we can’t walk down a corridor there now without bumping into several staff members we know. “Hello Jessops,” one nurse cried cheerily, the last time we were there. “Which one of you is staying with us tonight?”
I’m reminded of the scene in The Graduate, in which Benjamin takes his girlfriend to the bar of the hotel in which he has been conducting an affair with her mother. After Benjamin has been greeted by one staff member after another, the girl asks how come everyone knows him. He can only grin sheepishly.
The procedure about to be performed on me is, sadly, nothing like the one Mrs. Robinson performed on Benjamin. It’s an appendectomy. By one surgical means or another – and I won’t bore you with the details – the offending organ has to come out. Not before time. The wretched thing gave me considerable gyp a few weeks back, you may recall, by perforating – or as we used to say, bursting – a potentially nasty business, and sometimes fatal. The surgeons left the wretched organ in on that occasion, as my guts were then, and I quote, “in a bit of a mess”.
There was some hope then that the Thing would wither and die. Well, it didn’t. Evidently it is alive, if not well, and must now, in punishment for trying to blow up my insides like some biological suicide bomber, suffer the supreme penalty: death by extraction.
I just thought I would let you know, in case I don’t get round to a Rant over the next few days.
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