I’m hoping and praying for a continuation of potency

I’ve had a medical procedure that is ‘likely’ to leave me impotent. A nurse is coming around dishing out Tramadol, a painkiller of the morphine family. I raise my hand smartly. She steers her drugs trolley towards me and my bed in the corner of the six-bed male ward. ‘Are you in pain, Mr Clarke?’ ‘Absolute agony,’ I say. I’m looking fetching in a pair of white, knee-length tights. I’m hooked up to a drip to put fluids in, and catheterised to take them away. This thickness of the catheter tube and the site of its emergence is hard to credit at first. The fluid in the collection bag looks mostly like blood. I’ve lost all feeling from the waist down. But I’m not in pain. On the contrary I feel quite magnificent. The residue of the Rohypnol I was given this morning to sedate me, plus the continued effects of an epidural, have made pain a distant memory.