This is another story about the stupidity of youth visited on the adult. Again I’m having my life saved by a bunch of very smart people (all ladies as it happens) who have found potential time bombs on my skin and are removing them with extreme prejudice. It’s the only time I’ve had to firstly be put to sleep and secondly have to stay overnight in hospital after having an admittedly larger chunk of me than normal being removed from my person. When I woke up in the recovery room. I experienced something I remembered and immediately forgot the couple of other times I’ve been through step 1 of the lethal injection process. Immediately on waking I was aware of an extremely vivid dream and assumed I was still in it until the brain fog cleared sufficiently a few minutes later by which time I had completely forgotten what I was dreaming about other than that it was about….something extremely vivid. An anaestho-psychologist probably has a name for this phenomenon.

This one was tricky in that it’s on my shin where the skin is very tight. So the same plastic surgeon who is already somewhat familiar with my chest and my thumb will chop out the offending piece then cut a flap in my shin skin big enough and pliable enough to stretch over and cover the hole, then stitch it all back togetheragain. It was either that or another skin graft (as happened with the thumb) and the flap was considered to be a better option. Mine is not to reason why. I was going to say this was the Josef Mengele option but chose not to as it would be too offensive.

Now that it’s done, I can’t move it for a week or two and if I have to move around, it was going to be with the aid of crutches. I had extensive experience with crutches having broken my ankle as a 15 year-old playing rugby. So no issue there I thought, until I tried. I’m now using something that looks more like one of those walker things. That gives me five contacts with the ground (not counting my dodgy leg) instead of three. My chances or remaining upright improved by 66%.

I spent the last couple of days ranking the various offerings on streaming services we subscribe to so I can decide my viewing preferences while laid-up. There’re about a dozen series I’ve abandoned through waning to complete lack of interest. Having waited in vain for season 6 of Slow Horses, I guess I’m going to have to revisit the first 5. Or watch replays of the few games my football team has won this season.

Golf is out for at least a month. As I’m writing this I’m watching the ladies golf on Fox Sports on TV. I wouldn’t mind going to sleep right now as it’s after midnight but the bloke opposite me in this 4 person ward is snoring like a chainsaw. It did stop for while after what sounded like a minor struggle. Either he rolled over onto his front or one of my room mates shoved a pillow into his face. To balance the snoring with a higher pitch, alarms keep going off. I thought they were loud mobile phones and figured that was why the nurses in the nurses’ station immediately outside the ward door were ignoring them. In fact, their ability to ignore them is up there with the ability of your average middle and upper class Indian to not see the ubiquitous squallor around them. A nurse just told me it won’t be happening again tonight. It’s now 4.00am and they have started up again with a vengeance. Unlike on Netflix medical shows like “House” when an alarm goes off it means someone is in cardiac arrest or similar and requires a team of doctors to save them, here I think it means the tea’s getting cold.

Incidentally, I need to apologise to the gentleman opposite me who I can confidently say will never read this blog. Remember, this guy sounds like a train in a tunnel when his snore hits peak Fred Flintstone. The only comparable sound I can think of would have been emitted by our late cat, Eddie the Engine, he of the loudest purr in the world. Of course Ed would need to be about 15 times bigger and commensurately louder that he was as a fully grown (very fully in Ed’s case) cat. But I also assumed he (the bloke opposite, not Ed) was emitting occasional high-pitched farts until I realised it’s me. Well, not actually me but the machine hooked up to my one good lower leg. I have this cuff, like a blood pressure measuring cuff which wraps round your elbow, wrapped around my calf. It regularly expands and contracts to keep the blood circulation up and prevent clotting in said calf. When it deflates, well you now know the rest.

I know there’s a whole litany of first world problems here but is this what 46 years with the same private health insurer gets you? By the way, the food is better than your average airline food but not all of the TV channels work.

It seems the bloody spec on the base of my left thumb was a basal cell carcinoma. I say “was” as it is no longer attached to me. It may still “be” but when the pathology lab has finished with it, it will most definitely “be” a “was”.

Hopefully what was removed yesterday will be the end of it, at least for the immediate left thumb area otherwise it will eventually resemble a target as ever increasing rings of me are removed. The first excision was about half the size of my little finger nail. That proved insufficient as the little bastard was sending out scouting parties. Yesterday’s effort (removed by a plastic surgeon) was the size of a 10 cent piece. If she didn’t get it all this time because this little carcinoma was particularly adventurous then next time I imagine we may be looking at something resembling the size of a squash ball.

The upshot of this was that I no longer have the use of my left arm. Only temporarily of course but as this picture indicates, I’ll have a very smelly arm by the time that lot’s removed.

That seeming over-reaction is to keep a skin graft in place. A similarly sized piece of me was removed from my upper inner arm and sewn onto my thumb.

The upside is that there is a five day cricket test match between India and Australia underway and the most energy I am allowed to expend is waving the remote in the general direction of the TV. And picking up a glass. With my right hand. And thankfully wine bottles have screw caps. Well Australian wine bottles do. That Portuguese number which was in our admirable liquid based Advent Calendar had a cork in it so I had to prevail on the child bride to do the honours. We’re dreamin’ of a white and red and bubbly Christmas.

If I don’t get back to you before the 25th, have a good one.

There’s a lady in this world who has repeatedly saved my life. I’m not talking about my wife, my mother, my daughter or my granddaughter who are all a very large part of my world or various girlfriends (numbers 1, 2 and 3 in particular – christened thusly by the child bride in fact, and girlfriends of the purely platonic type I might add). I’m not talking about a religious icon or a sporting legend or a racehorse, none of whom/which have risen to sufficient heights of achievement to even raise my heart rate. To be fair though, if Monica Bellucci could play rugby, she’d be up there.

No, I’m talking about my dermatologist. I visited her again yesterday and left with a bloodied right leg, a bloodied left hand and a slightly bloody left arm. But first we have to backtrack a little. Actually, I wish it was a little but it’s actually a lot. I was born in the UK some decades back and it was immediately obvious that there is Viking in my ancestry – my red hair and fair complexion are dead (if you’ll pardon the expression) giveaways. Many years later this particular heritage also manifested itself via Dupuytren’s Contracture which is sometimes called Viking’s Disease amongst other things. Another lady specialist who fixed this up for me only saved my left hand from becoming a permanent heavy metal horns symbol and thereby preserving my (marginal) ability to play the guitar. But Mr Dupuytren’s another story. Back to my skin.

Leaving the UK to live in Australia when I was eight was a blessing in disguise (which my mother still hasn’t seen through) from every angle except for, in my case, the sun. Don’t get me wrong – I love the sun, not least for the fact that it keeps us alive and will continue to do so for another 4 billion years give or take unless the most recent 12 year time frame for irreversible climatic catastrophe and atmospheric mayhem predicted by the IPCC and supported by those doyens of atmospheric physics, left wing journalists and humanities students, comes to pass. All of the others haven’t so their odds of getting it right are increasing even if temperatures and sea levels aren’t moving other than by utterly normal fluctuations. The sun is only my enemy when I expose my extremely combustible skin to it which makes me sound rather vampirish. Thankfully that particular quirk of my genome hasn’t kicked in yet because I prefer sleeping at night rather than swooping on unsuspecting bare necked tottie.

As kids we weren’t aware of the long term effects of extended sun exposure so we grimaced through the sunburn, peeled off the dead skin, took our shirts off and did it all again. It’s not my fault if in neighbourhood football games I was always picked on the “skins” team and never the “shirts”. I still remember lying face down on a bed in my mother’s aunt’s ramshackle house in the then sleepy village of Byron Bay, with blisters all over my back and a plague of insects swarming through the house. The next day we had to tie my mother to a tree to stop her hitchhiking to Brisbane Airport to escape from this Stephen King nightmare and back to the civilisation of Timperley, Cheshire, England.

I survived however but just as the Soviets supposedly planted sleeper cells in the US during the cold war, I had my own sleeper cells which decades later have been waking up. And this is where my life-saver lady comes in. She wasn’t the first to stick a scalpel into me but certainly the most frequent over recent years. After my GP at the time tired of squirting liquid nitrogen at various blemishes on my person, he referred me to a specialist dermatologist who soon after went off to do research and gave me to an associate, the aforementioned lady. I have been to see her many times over many years and I never escape from her surgery unscathed. She is always scraping, digging or cutting, hence the reference to bloodied appendages, above. I’m a bleeder, what can I say.

Occasionally, if the cutting part is a bit tricky, she’ll send me to a plastic surgeon. Here was me thinking plastic surgeons were only there to straighten actress’s noses or make their tits bigger. But no. One did a job on me that required a degree in ear lobe origami. Another did a much more basic job on my back that left a 50mm scar. This and other rather smaller scars randomly scattered over my torso and appendages proved quite an attraction for one of the theatre nurses. The conversation went something like this:

Nurse – Another scar eh?

Me – Yeah, looks like it. Still it won’t be lonely.

Nurse – No but there’s nothing wrong with a few scars.

Me – Come again?

Nurse – Yeah, scars are sexy. Girls like a few scars on a bloke.

Me – Doctor, can we get moving here.

The point is, had those sleeper cells been allowed to wake up, scratch their balls, have a few beers and generally hung out, they would have eventually morphed into something infinitely uglier and much more dangerous. So the trick is to eliminate the cancerous bastards before they even know their short life’s objective which it to make my life shorter. And my guardian angel has been doing just that for years now. Had I adopted the same attitude as a number of people I’ve known or known about who couldn’t really have cared less until it was too late, I’d be a footnote in history.

The good news is that after reaching peak extraction a few years ago, we’re now down to the residuals. Anything that looks ever so slightly suspicious is ruthlessly dispatched to the pathology lab minus its previous mode of transport i.e. me. Three monthly checkups inevitably resulted in surgical follow-up. But eventually three months became six and yesterday I was told we are almost at the twelve month stage. She’s a lovely young lady to whom I literally owe my life and while I would like to think there will come a time when I don’t have to see her again, there won’t.