So, About the Hospital, Again

Back a few posts, I was talking about The Vic, a pub, and about strolling along in front of the Infirmary. I was, in fact, on the way to another hospital.

The reason for this was that I had an appointment to see a surgeon, (I went to the Vic on the way back), about a tooth. Yes, a tooth. 

About thirty years ago, I had a filling in the said tooth. Then I was hit in the face by a twelve-ton truck. Well, at the moment of impact I had 2/3 the width of a van between me and the truck. But he was doing fifty miles per hour and was quite determined to get to me, so after the loudness, which I vaguely recall, there was a pause, silence, echoing dripping noises.

Silence again. 

Next time my eyes opened, there were diamonds in red sauce across the back of my hand. I thought: "that's strange", and drifted back into dripping, echoey silence.
There's about a thousand words of ensuing drama  that I'll spare you. It was funny in places though. Ouch.

If, however, we fast forward, I ended up back then, needing to see a dentist, after all the doctors and nurses had done their thing (and the police officer had threatened to kill his prisoner on the late-night observation ward, if he didn't stop moaning and let the rest of us sleep), because the door pillar, that should have been a yard from my head, had imprinted itself on my face, and the filled second upper left molar had become explosively unfilled. 

I blame that incident. It got a gold cap on it, but that came out some years later. Bit by bit, over the intervening years, pieces of my tooth got broken off, or drilled off, and a few weeks ago I had an infection in the root. My dentist told me it was best if the tooth came out, but that she would prefer I had a surgical extraction in a hospital. 

I'm no expert, I trust her to be one, so she referred me to a specialist. And last week I had a consultation with him, and set a date, today, for surgery. Originally, they said it would be under a general anaesthetic, but, I'm asthmatic, so general anaesthesia is to be avoided wherever possible. We agreed on local anaesthesia. 

So this morning, at seven, I was booked in to a private hospital, for a procedure funded completely by britain's national health service, and I can report that all went well. Right now, there's a bit of a throb, but I'm trying to ration the painkillers, I'll take another soon, before bed. 

However, I know some of my U.S. readers are great opponents of "socialized medicine", and fear our ramshackle commie system may be imposed upon them, with 'politicians deciding who lives or dies' (as opposed to the current U.S. system, where insurance companies decide who lives or dies).

Here's some views of the commie hospital's death-row cell, with my fees paid by the NHS.

Primitive, huh? I've certainly stayed in worse hotels. So this tooth-out business. It's the first time ever for me that a visit to the dentist require me to strip naked, then don disposable underwear, and one of those nasty tie-at the back gowns.

It's also the first time that I've ever been conscious whilst being attached immovably to an operating table, under those huge lights that could fry a whole planet. 

After a lot of crunching noises, drills, cutters, chainsaws and so on, (I think there was even a hedgetrimmer at one point), it was over. The surgeon practiced his best sewing techniques, cracked a few jokes, and I made inaudible noises of gratitude, as I was wheeled out to the recovery room, where a very nice nurse hooked me up to the machine that goes beep, and undertook a one sided conversation with me for? I have no idea how long, then wheeled me back down to my room, where I read the same page in my book over and over again, until the fog in my head started to clear. Another nurse came to check on me, hooked me up to another beepbox, talked through the medications she'd brought, and asked me to confirm my name date of birth and address, which was about the zillionth time today I'd given it. I also had a wristband with all that plus a QR code, for which I was very grateful, I had visions of getting mis-identified and coming out with the wrong number of kidneys, or maybe a boob job.

I'm not to drive for 24 hours, or operate machinery. I'll bet a computer counts as machinery, phoo, I might post naked images of myself  that I'd regret after they went viral.

No. I care too much for you people, so I'll post naked pictures of someone else instead.