A Small Residual Positive.

While I was undergoing my crisis of excruciating pain and high fever last Thursday, a nurse kept coming to me and asking ‘Are you all right?’ It irritated me a lot because it must have been as obvious as the fob watch on her dress that I was anything but all right. But then I concluded that it was probably standard procedure in order to establish that the patient is both conscious and compos mentis, and ‘are you all right’ is a simpler question to consider than ‘what is the square root of 121?’ All you have to do is say ‘no.’

And in retrospect I have to admit that there is something pleasing about maintaining my accustomed irascible response even while being keel hauled under the medical equivalent of hell and being semi-conscious into the bargain.