Open Writing

Since I had almost recovered from the harrowing brain tumour operation I saw on television a few years ago, I was granted permission to watch a TV programme, showing a housewife’s terrifying experience on the operating table.

But after witnessing the distressing scene where the surgeon probed her exposed brain until she almost reached breaking point and hearing her fully conscious pleas for him to ‘Please don’t do that again,’ I confess I suffered a relapse.

Oh, the wonders of science. By the simple flick of a switch we can be transported to all portions of the human body. One moment we can be coping reasonably with our simmering ailments then after a detailed and colourful visit to a ‘theatre’ we are immediately re-analysing our symptoms. Before the miracle of television, operations were something aunts whispered about, with painful upward glances, and lots of head shaking. Today the cameras sweep up to the bedside and we are almost hand in glove with the surgeon. Auntie can discuss in lucid detail the wonders of heart a transplant or the various techniques of hysterectomy without setting foot in a hospital.

Erudite descriptions concerning scalpels and sutures are on almost everyone’s lips, a visit to a practitioner must be nearly as awe-inspiring for him. At one time we complained, ‘It’s my back, doctor,’ now it’s ‘Spasmodic pressure in the pelvic region.’

But can we cope with all this medical insight being doled out between the adverts, is it really healthy?

A little knowledge can be dangerous, but a lot can be downright fatal.

A friend often tells me how well she feels after visiting anyone sick in hospital. It has the reverse effect on me. Half-an-hour at a bedside and I seem to develop everyone’s symptoms and by the time I leave I have aged ten years. It doesn’t help me to see other people suffer.

Mind you, I am a practising coward with phobic tendencies, but I suspect there are others who share my affliction. After a cancer operation was televised recently, everyone at our house seemed to spend twice as long in the bathroom. I can’t speak for all members, but I know some of us were surreptitiously searching. The heart operations leave us breathlessly confined to armchairs for longer stretches than usual.

I wonder if these programmes have any effect on the surgery ratings?

Do they line the walls with anxiously pale hypochondriacs like myself? I long to peep, but these places are so well guarded I suppress my curiosity.

It takes enough courage to face the appointments system when you are sick. One always feels so vulnerable when facing the white-smoked receptionists, wondering if they know all one’s shameful history. Perhaps they are a necessary deterrent for our overworked doctors.

We have progressed a long way from the days when a chap in bicycle clips called for the weekly payment towards the doctor’s bill, the days when it was considered ‘nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrowroots’ of friendly neighbours rather than add to this expense. The sound of scraping mudguards reminds me of our collector. This was the signal for my mother to hide the cigarette packet and suppress her bronchitis, either of these would evoke his favourite topic of conversation – the evils of tobacco. Having previously been a heavy smoker, he was an abstained of the worst kind. He could tell fearsome morbid epics about dying smokers that made my mother so nervous she smoked twice as much the rest of the day!

I often reflect on our old and beloved family doctor. His surgery was always overflowing – sometimes standing room only. He liked to hand out a humorous anecdote along with the prescription – all part of the treatment. I remember with gratitude his three visits during one week when our eldest was ill, his bass baritone rendering of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ heralding his arrival and departure, whatever the hour.

Yes, we have come a long way since then. Perhaps this heartening message I saw scrawled on a cricket club door in bold whitewash may cheer some ‘When you die, you go to Leeds.’

All is not lost.