ni.chol.as

Much to the chagrin of my numerous enemies, I have been telephoned by the doctor and informed that my blood pressure is Entirely Normal. Fears of my early demise from bacon-implicated heart attack or a blood clot the size of an apple are to be dismissed now. Sadly this does mean I don’t get to abuse beta-blockers for fun and profit, nor decline any kind of stressful work or brutal manual labour with pleading eyes and recital of the hallowed phrase, “my dodgy ticker, dontcha know”. News of my wonderful circulatory health came to me after I was referred to St. Thomas’ Hospital for a twenty-four hour ambulatory blood pressure test. This in turn came about because I was sick of doctors sucking their teeth and staring at an apparently borderline digital readout wondering what to do. In the end they always said “come back later and we’ll test it again”. The last doctor to procrastinate with me, I lost my patience and complained that they always said “come back later”. I convinced her I was a serious sufferer of White Coat Hypertension and I’m immediately sent to ‘spital to undergo Serious Tests.

The Cardiothoracic Outpatients ward is not a place you ever want to be for serious treatments. As much as hospitals are infested with the sense of imminent death at the best of times, the heart ward has to be the home for the final moments of many. I thought I’d seen frail before, but the white-haired, white-skinned skeletal remains of ashen human beings wheeled around that place bring “frail” into an entirely new context. I accidentally killed six of them just by walking past them a bit too briskly. You could hear the heart monitors squealing like broken alarm clocks and the pissed off nurse getting off her stool to attend yet another heart failure on the heart failure ward. Tragic. The savvy, viciously cunning ones, know that the best way to get a cup of tea on the ward is to rip their heart monitor pads off. Everyone shits themselves and dives for the crash cart and you’ve got an instant audience, “milk, no sugar, there’s a sweetheart.” Big toothy grin and mutterings of crying wolf.

The front desk clerk was one of those special people they breed from birth for this kind of hard-boiled job. She was sent at the age of 4 to a boot camp to learn the techniques she’d later need in her job as a public facing employee of the NHS. 30 savage years later, she was unleashed onto the Cardio ward in order to dispense desk-clerk justice. She could have torn my nipples off from across the room with a just a stare with what she learnt in that terrible place. She didn’t speak so much as barked her questions at me. I fancy that she alone must have been responsible for a spate of heart attacks caused by no more than her brand of tired, angry brusqueness. It didn’t help, then, that I was an hour late. “Go and sit down,” she said in a tone that made me feel shrivelled and airless. I obeyed her wordlessly and sat.

Some time later, and we’ll skip the dirty details of what happens behind those clean white curtains around hospital beds, I left the ward with a functioning ambulatory blood pressure monitor. I know it was working because it had been demonstrated to me, strangling all the blood out of my arm until it turned purple and threatened to drop off. Then slowly, painfully slowly, releasing the pressure until my fingers regained their feeling in sharp pricks of fading numbness. I walked down the hall and spun round the corner where the monitor promptly fell off the shoulder strap and hit the floor. The rubber hose attaching it to the cuff on my arm detached and I was once again reminded why now is the time to buy health insurance and avoid ever coming near a place like this again. I want gold taps and working velcro in the next hospital I go to. I jury-rigged it back together with some moleskin tape and hoped that it’d work at the next scheduled measurement. The idea of the machine is nothing special. I’d half-expected a futuristic magic medical device but what it actually is is a huge grey box with a rubber hose and a bog-standard blood pressure cuff that inflates once every half hour in the day and every hour at night to painful, numbing effect. The simplest of digital displays shows you your systolic, diastolic and heart rate. It becomes a bit of a sport at this point, they should never give that kind of feedback to geeks, it’s too much. I ended up with a 24 hour urge to graph the whole thing. At least I know my blood pressure when taking a poop is roughly the same as when eating cereal. Hard scientific fact right there, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Hmm. Not a great digression. Where were we? Oh, yes, leaving hospital. Phone call. Excellent news. Job done, I can continue with my plan to drink like a fish and eat fried breakfasts until I’m 80. Excellent news. Pass me that last rasher of bacon, will you?