Scars

Nee nah nee nah ...

At the time of writing this I am lying in bed feeling under the weather. I always feel guilty about being off work when I’m sick. For all my moaning about my job and the people I work with, most of whom I am at best indifferent to if I’m honest, I must have some deep seated sense of loyalty to the office which still manages to produce a flicker on my Give-a-Fuckometer.

God knows why that should be so; I work for a government organisation which has fostered an atmosphere of uncertainty about its future (and indeed mine) and is devoid of sensible planning and decision making. I'm expected to do more with less, to forego any sort of pay rise for the foreseeable future, and pay more into a pension fund which will ultimately pay out less than I was promised when I entered into a contract of employment with the civil service. Officially I'm expected to do this without criticising the government because at work I am their impartial employee. Well I’m not at work now; I’m at home sick, so fuck ‘em!

I had actually intended to write about the time I had appendicitis. I should actually say 'times' in plural, because for a couple of years in my late teens my appendix was a grumbler. It would enflame giving me sickness and incredible pain, only to subside again after a few hours. One day, aged 18 and away at university, I realised that the time had come to have it removed. The big clue was the fact that I was literally banging my head against a door because of the agony. With a friend I walked to the nearby C&A hospital in Bangor, North Wales. I walked because ambulance drivers were in the middle of a dispute, and although an ambulance might eventually have come, walking seemed better than just waiting.

I got there not a moment too soon. In little more than the time it took for a male nurse to shave off my pubic hair with a dry Bic razor, I was wheeled off to theatre. The surgeon told me later that the appendix was on the point of bursting when he took it out.

After a couple of days in a hospital bed (during which a huge nurse asked loudly right across the ward whether I’d moved my bowels that day), I was released into the care of my personal tutor, whose car caught fire on the way back to my hall of residence. I was then taken back to Shrewsbury where I recuperated at my girlfriend’s parents’ house. My own parents weren't getting on too well at the time and I just wanted peace and quiet.

I still have the scar from the operation of course, but it’s faded quite a lot now. I quite like having scars, albeit not very noticeable ones. There is a tiny one on my right leg even now from when my brother threw a dart in it. The scar has moved around over the years as I’ve grown. And I have one above my eye which I got falling out of a shopping trolley in Germany (I was 21 and pissed; the doctor who patched me up didn’t believe a word of it). As for mental scars, I guess we all have them too and you sometimes have to be much braver about those. Maybe that's something to blog about another time.

Left a bit, right a bit ...