The four-weekly visit for her oncology treatment is once again upon my wee missus. A scheduled sojourn that appears to come around faster ever month.
Incidentally, that isn’t a complaint. The diminutive County Durham lass and her clan are grateful for every goddamn second at these visits, as it means her tenacious fight continues. The battle not yet lost to the faceless nemesis who’s blighted her existence for almost eight years.
Waiting room in situ at St James’ Hospital, the pair of us are currently sitting on a relatively comfortable black imitation leather sofa. To my right, my wife Karen reads the book ‘The Butterfly Box’, during which she bears a look of such intense concentration (to use one of her mum’s unreliable adages) it could sink a ship
I say unreliable as I’m pretty sure focusing intensely while absorbing prose from pages of a book doesn’t impart it’s reader with powers of sea vessel submergence…… Although it might go some way towards explaining why her mum felt moved to read twenty books when I cruised the Mediterranean a few years back.
Even if she had the wherewithal to disable a ship by intense book reading, I’d suggest Karen’s unassuming nature would negate against her undertaking such a spiteful, irresponsible and unnecessary act .
Waiting for her injections, my betrothed and me are sitting outside the Transplant Therapeutic Apheresis Unit. A ward whose entrance sign advises was opened by Lynda Hamlyn on 20th January 2011, Chief Executive of NHSBT at the time of unveiling.
To my left a man, who I’d guess to be in his 60’s, intersperses impatient sighing with picking his nose and eating it’s contents……. Who says that hospital food can’t be flavoursome and appealing?!
Thankfully. as I wrote that he’s been called into his appointment. I don’t know what treatment this chap is due to receive, but I’d moot nursing staff may have an additional task of remove his right index finger from one of his nostrils.
Still perched to my right, my missus luckily avoided seeing the old guy’s habitual bogey retrieval due to my less than svelte frame.
With Karen still awaiting treatment, it’s been a longer wait than we ordinarily experience. I’m hoping she soon gets into the ward, though, as if her mum’s old wives tale is correct, the way my wife is powering through her book I envisage global sea lane carnage.
Although I can’t see a TV, emanating from the Transplant Therapeutic Apheresis Unit, I can hear ITV’s daytime show This Morning broadcasting tales of whimsy to their discerning viewers (or listeners in my case). As much as I respect it’s presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, listening to tales of a man with three penises (one for urinating, one for procreation and one for picking his lottery numbers) really isn’t my idea of ‘go to’ telly.
Approaching the conclusion of this monologue, on re-reading the draft prose I’ve written above, it dawned on me how ridiculously silly this blog is, even by my standards.
I make absolutely no apologies, though, as this journal is all part of my journey. An unashamed chronicling of my daily thoughts, epiphanies and inadvertent application for admission into Waterloo Manor hospital for the mentally unstable.
