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Published: November 18th 2008
‘Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.’ J.Lennon
The last night before we were due to leave Broome we went to the pictures, not because there was anything terribly good on, but because the cinema itself was a marvel. Sun Pictures is the oldest continuously-operating outdoor garden cinema in the world, a somewhat convoluted claim to fame, more than made up for by its charming wooden indoor/outdoor arrangement, full of old Hollywood memorabilia and quaint touches, like seating entirely in old-fashioned deck-chairs.
Now some might say that going to an outdoor cinema in the tropics to see a film called ‘Tropic Thunder’ was asking for trouble, but the weatherman seemed fairly certain all would be clear, so we decided to give it a go.
Ben Stiller has a knack for starring in films which are either great or, well, not so great. By halfway through I was finding this one particularly excruciating. Strangely enough, everyone else seemed to be enjoying it hugely. My problem was not with Ben and his merry crew, but with the aforementioned deck-chairs, which rapidly progressed from uncomfortable to agonising as my entire back went into spasms. Well before the movie’s
climax I had to give up completely and hobble out, my back by now so completely cramped up that I couldn’t even stand straight.
Funnily enough as soon as the credits rolled my pain disappeared, and along with it my ape-like gait, and I decided the whole episode might have been down to Ben and his band of fools after all.
Eight hours’ driving the next day suddenly seemed an unattractive prospect though, and we decided a day’s rest might in order. All seemed to be going swimmingly until just after midnight, when Ben returned to haunt me, awakening in nightmarish agony as once again my spine tried its best to break free from my body. This time I decided to blame the in-car bed, a hand-made contrivance never 100% comfortable at the best of times. A quick shuffle round the block or two and she’ll be right, mate.
As it turned out, though, she wasn’t. She still wasn’t a few minutes later when I toddled off to the bathroom and found myself completely unable to pee.
Somewhere from high up in the vault of my cranium a penny dropped, and from there bumped and rattled itself
around, jangling in the empty void.
We’d been here before.
One evening early last year Debbie unexpectedly shot up from the sofa, announced in a somewhat startled tone that she suddenly really needed a wee, and then disappeared without trace. It took me a while to notice anything was amiss, as she timed it in the last ten minutes of an exciting Footy final. As the whistle blew on the game, I at last registered that I was all on my own, and had been for quite some time.
Eventually I found her curled up in the foetal position on the bathroom floor, fairly obviously in considerable discomfort, having been unable to pass a drop. I somewhat guiltily gave her back a tentative rub, which astonishingly turned out not to be the miracle cure she required. Within 10 minutes we were down at the hospital with suspected kidney stones.
Could the shoe now really be on the other foot? If it was it felt a bloody tight fit.
Sure enough our roles were reversed, and before long Debbie was at the door wondering what the hell was going on.
“It’s just my back!” I
Boranup Forest
I'm getting chilly!hollered,”It’s nothing, really. Just give me a moment and I’ll be fine!”
Ten minutes later we were down at the hospital. Suspected kidney stones.
The funny thing was, despite a most sympathetic nurse throwing every painkiller she had at me, up to and including intravenous morphine, nothing really seemed to make much of a difference. They were simultaneously pumping me full of saline and handing me glass after glass of water.
“What we really need is for you to pee. When you do it’ll feel like you’re being cut to pieces from the inside with razorblades, but you’ll probably feel much better after.”
With encouragement like that it was hardly surprising that I was finding it difficult to go.
Finally the torment was ended by the simple measure of putting a hot-water bottle under my back. Admittedly it did coincide with my last pump of morphine, but led me to question whether it wasn’t all down to my back after all, and just me being a wimp.
“Don’t worry; you’re not being a wimp!”
Apart from being a dab-hand with hot-water bottles, it would appear she could also read minds.
“Kidney stones
for a man are more painful than giving birth!”
Is that giving birth for a man, then, I thought? How the hell do they know these things? And what if they don’t find a stone? Will I still not be a wimp? Come to think of it, what if they find a baby?
Seven hours and seven litres of saline later and there was still no weeing, and eyebrows were starting to be raised all round. The radiographers didn’t get in till 9, so we would just have to wait. Fortunately, just as Defcon 1 was about to be declared, I needed to wee in the biggest possible way.
It felt exactly like somebody was cutting me to pieces from the inside with razorblades. Sadly nothing solid was delivered, neither stone, nor sharpened implements nor nine-pound bouncing baby. Even so, at least it showed I still had functioning kidneys and security status was rapidly downgraded as I was finally wheeled away for a CAT scan.
What the CAT scan showed was a lump in my left kidney about the size of a marble. As I couldn’t recall unaccountably misplacing any marbles of late, we had to
assume I had a super-size kidney stone. Way too big to pass, apparently, which in part explained the seven hour wait.
“What we really need is to get you to hospital.”
This really was most surprising news indeed. What with the pain I hadn’t been paying particular attention to the route when we arrived in the early hours. Had Debbie accidentally taken me to the Vet instead?
“The big hospital,” they explained. “In Perth.”
To their credit they did stock me up with a formidable array of drugs before we left, but sadly could spare no hot-water bottles. Still a three day drive to remove a mysterious marble was not something I’d planned for the holiday itinerary. To put it in perspective, the distance is equivalent to being admitted to hospital while on holiday in say, Brighton, only to be told that the nearest available treatment is from a clinic in Moscow.
Luckily the three days passed almost without incident, apart from us both being showered with glass after the windscreen was comprehensively shattered by a passing roadtrain. Bad luck comes in threes, so they say, and so far we were only on two.
An appointment had been arranged with a Urologist in Perth, Dr Alex Vujvjvjvjvjvjvovic. Okay, not sure of the exact number of vs and js there, or how you pronounce it, but the most surprising aspect of the name was that Alex was a woman.
She sat me alongside Debbie across her desk and explained the planned procedure with a little drawing.
“You’re going to have a laser lithotripsy,” she explained.
Oh, well of course. Why didn’t you say?
“These are your kidneys up here.” This needed explaining, as she was no Van Gogh.
“There is a stone blocking your left one, right here.”
That’s the left one, then, right? I was beginning to get confused already.
“Your kidneys connect through these little tubes - the ureters - to your bladder, and then flow out into the outside world through your urethra, here.” All very diplomatic.
“We’ll be using a laser to blast the stone into tiny fragments which can then pass harmlessly...”
Which will feel like being cut to pieces from the inside by razorblades again, yeah, I know...
“...and we’ll be gaining access as close as possible to the
Prevelly Beach
I'm Bloody Freezing! stone by inserting the laser here...”
She stabbed at the page with the pen. My eyebrows furrowed slightly. Hang on a minu...
“Up Your Penis.”
There was a pregnant pause for a moment as she let the news soak in.
“Any questions?”
She looked earnestly from Debbie to me and back again.
Any questions? The first and most obvious one was ‘I’m sorry, could you just repeat that last bit? I don’t think I can have heard you right,’ but as far as I was aware, my ears were working just fine.
Debbie merely sat gently nodding her head as if to say “No, that all seems pretty routine.”
I glanced hopefully around the room, searching for anybody else who just might have a penis to lend support, but sadly we were just a threesome.
Okay, second question. Just exactly how big is this laser?
Before the words could form on my lips I decided it was probably for the best if I didn’t know.
“Uh,no,” somebody said. “That all seems to be, um, just fine.”
The good news was that at least I’d be asleep at the
time, and it would only be an overnight hospital stay. The bad news was that she couldn’t fit me in, so to speak, for a week. I fervently hoped she planned to spend the next seven days flat-out further miniaturising her equipment.
And so we were set free for a week in Southwest Australia, which ordinarily would have been a delight, but the weather decided to further dampen my spirits by being uncharacteristically cold and miserable. I previously lived in these parts for three years and don’t remember it ever getting this chilly. Five years in Cairns, it seems, really have turned me into something of a wimp. God knows what I’ll do next time we get back to Scotland. I was secretly hoping I might have got away with this bad weather being the third piece of bad luck.
Fortunately by the end of the week it brightened up nicely, giving us a chance to catch up on the delights of the Margaret River winery region and re-acquaint ourselves with a few old friends, both of the liquid and human variety. Many, many thanks to Kym and Chris, and Roche and Todd for their hospitality, and for
showing an admirable restraint by not collapsing in fits of laughter on hearing of my upcoming fate. It was a real pleasure to catch up with you guys again.
Inexorably, though, the pleasure turned to pain as D-day rolled around.
All week I did my very best to dispel thoughts of my impending peril. Back as a kid lasers had seemed to hold such exciting futuristic possibilities. As I'd twirled my imaginary light-sabre this way and that way back when, this wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind as my first direct contact with laser technology.
First off on the big day was to meet the anaesthetist. Now this was a pretty important guy, in my book. Should he be a bit stingy with his measures, after all, I would be left in the waking nightmare of the Aware. It didn’t bear thinking about. On the other hand, if he was a bit too loose with his juice, we could be in for the mother of all near-death experiences.
“Suddenly there was a dark tunnel with a bright white light at the end, and I could hear the angels singing. Then I felt myself float up out
of my body and rise up to the ceiling, and I looked down and Whoah!!! What the hell’s going on down there?”
And there it was laid out before me, my unconscious form draped head to foot in the old ‘reverse fig-leaf’ look, never a winner in the high-fashion stakes, with Dr Alex looming over me in full Darth Vader outfit, wielding her red light-sabre like an illuminated sword of Damocles.
“How in the name of the Dark Side can I try to fit this thing in there?” she enquires asthmatically.
Yoda is assisting: “There is no try. Only do!”
“Very well. Move into full attack formation. Thrusters set to high. I’m on the leader.”
She hesitates for a moment.
“Hmmm, the Foreskin is strong in this one! Jabba, we’re going to need that gas turned right the way up!”
Fortunately the anaesthetist, when he finally arrived, was neither obese nor reptilian, and he did me proud. Maybe I should rephrase that. Anyway, next thing I knew I was coming round.
“Wake up, Andy, it’s all over. We’ve had to put a stent in, I’m afraid.”
This, it turned out, was
the real third piece of bad luck.
A stent, for those of you not lucky enough to have been acquainted with one, is a flexible plastic tube, a bit like a mini-hosepipe, inserted to stop your own tubes from blocking off. It has a curl at each end like a mini treble-clef to stop it shifting around. I’d had one placed between my kidney and bladder, as ‘with it being such a large stone, there’d been quite a bit of instrumentation.’ This was exactly the kind of information I’d rather they’d kept to themselves. As a result I was going to be ‘pretty sore’.
Debbie also had a stent placed after her operation a year ago, so I’d some idea of what was to be expected. It stayed in six weeks, after which she needed another general anaesthetic to have it removed. Another six weeks hanging around would definitely not be good for the schedule.
Dr Alex visited the next afternoon, once I was back to my wits, and explained that luckily my stent would be in for a mere five days. “Just come to my rooms on Tuesday and all being well we’ll remove it there
and then.”
And will that need another general anaesthetic?
“No,no. Normally we use a local, but what with you being in a hurry to get away I’ll squeeze you in at the start of the list. We’ll just get you to take a deep breath and I’ll count to three.”
She didn’t actually say she’d tie the other end to the doorhandle, but I kinda got the picture.
To help make her job easier she’d thought ahead and tied a piece of thread to the end of the stent to connect it to the outside world, which was now neatly taped to my old fella. Funnily enough I’d noticed this already; trust me, it’s not the kind of thing you miss.
The only setback in this otherwise brilliant scheme was that whenever I moved, the thread tightened against the stent and basically garrotted me from the inside. Secretly I suspected the thread might actually convert to barbed wire just out of sight. This formed a neat triple-whammy with the return of weeing razorblades and the delightful visual spectacle of said wee having taken a holiday from its usual range of Evian to white wine, and
switched to a finely matured port. Believe me; you just didn’t want to go. Ironically the only post-operative instructions were to make sure you got plenty of fluids.
A measure of how much I enjoyed the stent was that I was actually looking forward to it being taken out.
Finally Tuesday came around and I wasn’t kept waiting. Before my bum could touch the waiting-room chair I’d been whisked in, trousers down and we were ready to go.
“Okay, ready?”
What if I say no?
“Now, take a deep breath.”
I filled my lungs till they almost burst.
“One...”
By now I’d closed my eyes in anticipation. After a few moments, I wished I hadn’t. What, had she suddenly forgotten how to count? Now let me see, what is it that comes after one? Outside I swear I could hear the faint rustle of seeds germinating and the flap of birds leaving on their annual migration.
“Two...”
I squinted open an eye. The little hand on the clock was not where it used to be. Bees were pollinating the saplings’ flowers and the birds were returning to their nesting grounds.
Hamelin Bay
Yay, Sunshine! “Three!” she exclaimed, with just a hint of glee, and the pulling began.
Very slowly.
Now at this point I’d like all the men reading to take a break, book a flight to South Africa and head off into the scrub, pig hunting. Having caught yourself a strapping swine, roast it over an open fire until the outside is charred nicely. Discard the outer layers and feast on the rare flesh below. After a few months’ gestation down a litre of bleach to induce copious vomiting, and with luck you will regurgitate a large tapeworm. Dip the tapeworm liberally in a mixture of premium unleaded and sulphuric acid and then insert into your Y-fronts until it finds a nice comfy home, ensuring you keep a hold of its tail. Now, strike a match, light the tapeworm, which by now will be quite wrigglingly writhesome, and remove it at a modest pace.
That’s what it feels like to have a stent removed.
For the ladies, I’m afraid you’ll just have to use your imagination. Put it this way: if you’ve ever tried living with a man, this is worse.
“And that’s it!” she pronounced, a
trifle triumphantly. “All done! One more thing before you go...”
What it was I’ve no idea. Answers on a postcard please.
That was enough for me.
I was out of there.
Two things I have learned from this experience.
Drink more water.
Please, I beseech you.
And secondly, never trust a woman with a man’s name who knows more about Star Wars than you do.
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Emma Gilchrist
non-member comment
Bloody Hell - i'll take child birth any day!