How the ERI helped me to survive an attack of the vapours
Not my best Friday night, I’ll admit, toilet-trapped while merry hell made its way through and spectacularly out of my interior. Saturday morning was worse.
Reluctantly, I called NHS 24. I wasn’t keen. I always think I’m ‘at it’ and shouldn’t bother people with a tummy upset, even if it involves quite a lot of blood. Also, it meant being exposed to the music-on-hold.
Today the entire back catalogues of Bach, Beatles and the Sex Pistols are easily available, but the NHS favours an endlessly looping weird soft rock number. It sounds like a 1970s audition tape made by someone’s nephew.
To keep listeners lively, the music sporadically gives way to crackling distortion, the giveaway clue to a damaged C60 cassette. Used to happen to my Osmond tapes if I’d overenthusiastically rewound the cartridge with a pencil.
Or it could be a bootleg recording of someone trying to summon Satan. You can just make it out, if you hear the distortion often enough. Believe me, I did.
Suddenly the soupy guitar was gone. Audrey was speaking to me. Asked loads of questions, assured me I wasn't wasting anyone's time, brought Cheryl in, who didn’t muck about and sent me to A&E. Assured me I wasn’t wasting anyone's time.
A&E at the ERI on a Saturday afternoon is a little more laid back than the battle zone it will become later, but it's still busy. Given my ‘interesting medical history’, I’m something of a veteran of the blue plastic chairs so I packed for waiting.
Top tips. Take a phone charger with a long cable, to reach faraway power points. Power banks are handy, you might be in a corridor. Grab a book or magazine, so you don’t rely on techno stuff to kill boredom.
Chuck in a bottle of water and a brunch bar. And be patient. Nobody in that waiting room wants to be there, you don’t know why they’re there, so getting riled up about who gets called next is pointless.
For a chronic people-watcher like me, A&E is like Disneyland. I could spend all day there. Just as well. I did.
Jolly nurses came and took blood, then a cheery young doctor appeared who asked all the same questions, and I gave all the same answers. Felt a little smug when he looked a tad perplexed.
Yes, I thought, medical enigma. Go me. Well, he said, I’m going to have to carry out an internal examination. I stopped feeling smug.
I draw a veil over what happened next. Let's just say that particular part of my anatomy hasn’t seen that much daylight for some time.
Off he popped, and then returned with the verdict. Apparently, I had a sort of dysentery. As a history addict, I was thrilled. How Victorian is that?
The doctor was a little downcast. He had no pills to prescribe. Antibiotics, the go-to weapons of modern medicine, are useless in the face of this old enemy. The best cure is, like the condition, Victorian. Rest and fluids. Not gin, though. He said that twice.
I was sent home, with the assurance that I hadn’t been wasting anyone's time, to make like a Victorian lady poet and get prone on the sofa with beef tea and an improving book.
Might get used to this. Pass the smelling salts.