The weather forecast was rain, torrential, all day, so I took my anorak. In the hospital car park it was spitting, nothing much, so I left it in the car.
My appointment was scheduled for 1.30. Before my name was called, I had time to browse the waiting-room bookshelf (paperbacks 50p, hardbacks £1). There, in the red livery of the Wordsworth Military Library, was Rorke’s Drift: A Victorian Epic by Michael Glover. I bore it back to my high-backed chair and started to read. When a nurse came in and called my name, I had to come all the way back from South Africa in 1879 to answer it.
This appointment was to receive the results of a scan. I was shown to an examination room and a minute later in she sailed, my lovely oncologist. As I’d guessed — the appointment had been hastily brought forward — this time I hadn’t got away with it. The scan had shown up suspicious anomalies in two ribs, two lymph nodes and a kidney. I would therefore have to go back on the tablets and in the very near future have a camera threaded up via my knob to investigate. Perhaps because my life is in her hands, my mental image of my oncologist is of a shining goddess. On this occasion I ventured to tell her so. ‘Nonsense,’ she said. Nevertheless, my pleasure at seeing her again easily outweighed the disappointment of the scan results.
After that I went down to level 2. On level 2 is the eye clinic. Last week I received my new glasses from the local optician. She also flogged me a detailed photo of the back of my eye for 25 quid.
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