Surviving the Trials and Ending on a High.

I negotiated today’s principal necessity with fortitude. I went for the CT scans and emerged relatively unscathed. Unfortunately, there’s nothing amusing to report because nothing amusing happened (unless you count the incident with the car park ticket which I’ll mention in a mo.) The staff are thin on the ground at the Royal Derby Hospital at the moment (as they are in all hospitals, I gather; shortage of staff in the NHS is a big political issue these days.) I used to be seen by three or four clinical staff before I made it into the scanner suite, but today one woman was doing all the jobs. I sympathised, naturally. And I managed a little of my usual banter, but nothing worth repeating.

The only drama happened when my car reached the ticket machine at the front of the queue (by which time I’d been moving slowly up the queue for nearly half an hour.) I waited for about five minutes for the screen to replace ‘car park full’ with ‘please take ticket’, but as I reached out to grasp the little piece of paper being disgorged from the appropriate slot, the wind caught it and blew it away. Such an occurrence has never happened to me before, and the problem should be obvious: you need to have the ticket for payment and validation in order to get out again. I opened the driver’s door just wide enough to see the ticket lying on the grass a few feet away, but the door wouldn’t open any wider because the ticket machine was in the way. I thought quickly – unusually for me these days. I drove the car forward to the now-open barrier, got out quickly to retrieve the ticket, and managed to get back in and drive through before the barrier came down onto the car. Of course, the man in the car behind could have had the good grace to leave his own vehicle, pick up my ticket, and hand it to me, but he seemed to be lacking the mental wherewithal to take the obvious remedial action. Maybe it was because his car was a lot newer and bigger than mine and he wasn’t inclined to give assistance to an inferior being. How can I know? In the event I drove on and hoped that his injection, or whatever, would hurt. (No I didn’t. I don’t think like that.)

But then came the nice bit. On my way to the X-Ray Department where the scanners are located, I called into Urology Outpatients to leave a gift (a box of Thornton’s chocolates) for the three Senior Nurses who have always been so friendly and lovely with me over the past five years. I left it with the receptionist who asked: ‘Who shall I say they’re from?’  ‘You needn’t tell them,’ I replied. ‘It doesn’t matter who they’re from. All that matters is that they know they’re appreciated.’ (That sounds noble to the point of sick-making, doesn’t it? It isn’t actually. To me it’s just logical.)  ‘Ahhh…’ said the receptionist, apparently fighting back the tears. I managed a smile and headed off to the Chamber of Secrets.

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And tonight I settled a conundrum which has been troubling me for the past few days. It concerned the identity of two very bright bodies in the night sky – one in the late evening which I assumed was Venus, and one at around two in the morning which I thought must be Jupiter. The problem was that because of their relative positions to planet earth, and because Venus is an inner planet but Jupiter an outer one, I might have got them the wrong way round. Tonight I found a website which told me I was right. That can’t be a bad end to a trying day, can it?