Prospects, Good and Bad.

OK, I’m very tired having had only four hours sleep last night, but I suppose I’d better give an update on the dreaded Follow Up.

It was fairly low key and neither my fervent hope nor my major fear came to fruition. The consultant didn’t say ‘You’re fine; go away’ and neither did he say ‘I’m going to attach this expanding dog lead to your neck so we can reel you in every three months and bend you to our will for the rest of your life.’

What he actually said was that the tumour in my kidney had been a high grade one. They come in three grades, apparently: low, medium and high. Mine was high. Well it would be, wouldn’t it? I’m a man of discernment who expects nothing but the best of and for himself. If JJ is going to get a tumour, it had damn well better be a high grade one. Ah, but should I be proud or afeared?

Well, it appears that the elevated status of the said gremlin is significant for some reason, which is why I was told that I should have CT scans on my lungs and stomach in six months time. Maybe those of us who attract the crème de la crème of the tumour hierarchy are more favoured by the denizens of that world and therefore more likely to be subjected to their repeated attention. I don’t know; I didn’t ask because the consultant was already running an hour late and I’m a considerate sort of chap as well as a discerning one. Besides, I still had the mystery condition to discuss with him, which is what I did next.

He told me I was falling prey to a vivid imagination. He told me there was nothing about the affected part which could be described as life threatening and that, in contradiction of my own diagnosis, I was not substantially deficient in that region. He suggested I probably had an infection – most likely caused by the catheter because “everything’s interconnected down there” – but he didn’t want to give me any medication, preferring to let nature take its course for the time being. He implied that the pain would go away once nature had chosen to cooperate, and I chose to infer a reasonable degree of confidence that my one Christmas present this year won’t be the acquisition of a woman’s voice after all. 

Are you getting my drift here? I would rather not be more specific because there’s a chance that somebody might read it before the 9pm watershed and I wouldn’t like to be responsible for an outbreak of swooning among the ranks of sensitive and respectable blog readers.

And that’s about it, apart from the fact that the esteemed doctor said I would also have to submit to another cystoscopy, which I knew already. I hate cystoscopies. They’re not nice, but that’s how it is.