It never rains but it pours
Yesterday was largely taken up with travelling to the designated medical centre for an appointment for a screening offered to me (as someone over the age of 65) by the NHS that is designed to provide an early warning sign – if any be detected – of a potential future abdominal aortic aneurysm.
Prior to yesterday, I have to be frank, and whilst I’m broadly familiar with most of the organs in my body, I hadn’t aware that I possessed an aorta.
As far as I can make out from the pamphlet I received by post it’s a tube (possibly a vein-like item?) that runs down the centre of your body and is designed to help pump your blood around your body.
Sounds fair enough.
If I didn’t have one, and if they were available gratis, or alternatively for a modest price, I might have chosen to have one implanted … just to be on the safe side.
As people get older (it says here) the wall of the aorta in the abdomen can become weak and then gradually expand. If it does that, it can go on to develop into an abdominal aortic aneurysm – a rare but potentially serious occurrence. Any individual may have a bit of a problem if one bursts because apparently about 85 out of 100 people then die.
Cripes. That’s not the kind of thing that one wishes to read over breakfast after, of course, having read all the newspaper sports pages in depth before picking up the pamphlet for the first time.
According to the blurb I was now reading, men are six times more likely to develop an ‘AAA’ than women and the chances of developing one increase with age. Another gem was that being a smoker (ever) increases one’s chances of having an AAA, plus having high blood pressure and/or someone in your family who’d already had one.
All this was slightly worrying.
In my youth and thirties I sometimes used to smoke King Edward stogies with great enthusiasm, most particularly after dinners on hot summer holidays in countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain when accompanied by a pint or two of gin and tonic laced with ice, lemons and Angostura bitters.
Happily, in recent years I have only suffered from high blood pressure when being forced to watch media interviews with that little prat Tim Farron, leader of the Lib-Dems … mind you, I’d been doing that quite a bit of that during the past seven weeks … and I was now becoming somewhat concerned that I’d already scored two out of three on the ‘dangerous back-story’ list.
Thus it was that I travelled to my appointment (using my Freedom pass) on my local bus service feeling somewhat anxious, a state that had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that there had been no indication in the pamphlet received of quite how the screening would take place – I had already prepared myself for the possibility that it might involve some sort of ‘pants down, bend over …’ and then some cold metal instrument or another shoved up where the sun don’t shine.
In fact my whole screening exam event passed almost without incident. All I had to do was lie on my back upon the appropriate table and remove my shirt and pullover.
The medical lady (at least I assume she was medically-qualified and not just a passing cleaner) then applied some gell to my stomach and then passed a plastic sensor over the area up to my chest in a manner that I was already wholly familiar with, having seen similar whenever a pregnant lady was having her baby screened on the weekly BBC1 documentary Holby City.
Within three or four minutes the procedure was over and I was told that I could now depart.
This wasn’t quite what I had expected – or indeed wanted.
I hadn’t yet told her that thirty years ago I used to puff (and sometimes inhale) upon six inch King Edward cigars, or that I had recently been watching TV coverage of the General Election, or indeed that I hadn’t a clue whether anyone in my family had ever had an AAA.
The medic sought to re-assure me. There was no sign at all that I had an enlarged aorta and I could depart with a clear conscience.
“Yes, but …” I protested, asking – now that I was in the ‘danger’ age range – how often and when exactly I might now have to return and be tested again in case my aorta was growing a bump or something.
No, there was no requirement on my part to return for another check-up. She repeated that there was absolutely no sign whatsoever that I had a problem with the state of my aorta – and that basically, since I had reached 65 without acquiring one, I was exceedingly unlikely to ever get an AAA.
Her exact words were “Don’t worry, whatever you die of, it’s not going to be an AAA”.
Dear reader, I cannot disguise that subsequently I descended two flights of stairs to the ground floor – and then skipped across the road to the R70 bus stop – upon a metaphorical cloud of air with all my fears and concerns having miraculously disappeared into the ether in a trice.
It reminded me, when I wish to tease my son, of how I point out that – statistically – I am far more likely to reach the age of 80 than he is. How so? Well, because of the fact I’ve already made it to 65, that’s why. Whereas, him being just 35, he’s somehow got to survive another thirty years before he can say that.
Later I found myself sitting up suddenly in my bus seat as I was coming past the Aldi store on the approach to my gaff – when I succumbed to an awful, doom-laden thought.
That bloody medic told me that, whatever I die of, it isn’t going to be an AAA. What was she trying to tell me … that I’m going to die any minute now, but from something else?!
I’ve been a bag of nerves ever since yesterday afternoon at 2.45pm when I got home.
In fact, I became so discombobulated that I spent the whole of the evening until 11.00pm drinking pints of gin and tonic and chain-smoking King Edward cigars.
