It Started With A Snore - Part 5

Also titled "They Also Wait Who Only Stand..." (with apologies to John Milton - not that he could give a monkey's)

Those of you who didn’t run away screaming at the sight of the author in T-shirt and accompanying sleep monitor paraphernalia, looking like somebody of interest to Crimewatch UK, may well have gone on to read the last article in which we left our hero(?) slumbering and snoring whilst wired up to the gills? If so, now read on...

The whole tangle of wires and monitors was shovelled back into the laptop case the following morning and whisked back to the relevant clinic by 10.00 am, as requested, for downloading and delivery to the next lucky recipient. I felt as if I’d had a pretty disturbed night, being acutely aware that any sudden movement (not that I’m known for those) might detach the whole apparatus. This drew a snort of derision from my good lady the following morning who referred to me as “snoring like a stuck pig” all night (no, I don’t know what that is either, but I get the general drift).

Having returned all of the equipment, the only thing to do now was to wait for the results. It was therefore, with some surprise, that we opened a letter from the hospital inviting me to attend to be fitted with a sleep monitor. We called them. We said there must be some mistake as we had already done this bit. They rummaged through their records and eventually came back to say that, no, there was no mistake; they needed to run the tests again. Of course, a note to this effect on the letter would have saved a phone call and their time answering it, but apparently doing anything other than send the standard letter would stretch the NHS to its limits.

So, we went through the whole process again and another few weeks drifted aimlessly by. Not that I was deprived of medical attention during this hiatus as my GP called me in to discuss the results of the Well Man clinic I had inadvertently let myself in for. These proved to be exactly the opposite of what I expected (cholesterol normal, blood pressure high-ish) but he had to admit defeat and refer me to the Opthalmic Consultant, which meant yet another trip to the hospital, albeit a different clinic this time.

As I said, right at the start of these articles, “I seem to have been seeing quite a bit of the medical profession recently. Or, I suppose more accurately, the medical profession have been seeing quite a bit of me” and, for someone who’s not that keen on hospitals, and all that goes with them, I seem to have become something of a fixture and fitting without apparently having anything wrong with me!