Another Day, Another Skirmish.

Today’s battle was pretty much the same as all the others – the getting there, the finding of a place to park, the struggle to accurately navigate the hospital complex with its bewildering array of twists and turns and levels, the anxious wait to be called, the irritating preliminaries, and finally the being pushed into a noisy machine and given orders. And at the end of it all there’s relief and the hope that you’ve pushed the enemy a little further back across the gain line.

And a temporary sense of relief does allow the inner self to reassert itself just a little. When the nurse removed the plastic thingy (blue one end, pink the other, remember?) which facilitates the pumping of dye into one’s bloodstream, I was struck by the fact that there was no blood on the puncture wound.

‘Where’s the blood?’ I asked the nurse.

‘What blood?’

‘The blood that should be there.’

‘There shouldn’t be any blood there.’

‘Well there was last time.’

‘That was last time.’

‘Are you having me on? The bloke over there had blood on his dressing, so why haven’t I got any?’

‘Believe me, there shouldn’t be any blood.’

‘Are you sure you haven’t made a mistake and drained it? Have I become a bloodless person and need to get used to the fact?’

‘No.’

‘Have I died and you haven’t told me yet?’

‘No.’

‘Then I suspect there’s discrimination going on.’

‘Hahaha.’

Meanwhile, a female fellow combatant sitting on a seat opposite began to titter, and I do so like it when people titter.

And so another battle is bravely met and now I wait for the letter, all the time reminding myself that I mustn’t engage in idle speculation as to what it might say. The possible permutations are many and varied as usual, and there’s no point in trying to predict where the enemy’s cannonball will land until it takes a chunk out of something.

One more battle is over but the war goes on. Waterloo is still some way down the line, dammit.