Things weren’t going well at all. They got worse when the young doctor stabbed me again. And again. Three, four, five,times and still he couldn’t draw any blood. He didn’t seem to recognise the irony as he said ‘you’re going to feel a little prick’ while trying (and failing) to withdraw some of my precious fluids for the sixth time. I didn’t point out that he was referring to the wrong one of us, but did suggest that he might call in an experienced nurse.
I was happy when he agreed but less so when she took one look at his inept work and pointed out that while jabbing in roughly the correct area – my arm – he’d actually managed to slip the needle alongside my vein, not into it. On noting that I was a slightly greener shade of pink than usual she moved him aside and went to work.
Within seconds my claret was flowing like a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie victim’s (NB: younger horror movie fans may wish to substitute Eli Roth for HGL here. Normal people can ignore both references).
The doctor patted my arm and apologised but I think he knew that he’d blown his chance to impress. I looked around for someone else to provide some comfort. Fortunately she was at the other side of my hospital trolley, having travelled with me from home in the ambulance.
In fact she’d been beside me when the chest pains had started, only I hadn’t wanted to mention anything as I didn’t want to spoil her evening. We’d had a lovely Valentine’s Day together and, for her at least, it was about to get better. Emmerdale was due to start on TV.
I don’t like to cause a fuss so I kept quiet as some people onscreen argued noisily in a pub, even though the ache in my chest was getting worse. I stoically bore both pain and program when someone was complaining about how they were being blackmailed even though I could feel pins and needles spreading down my left arm. I really didn’t want to spoil her evening but was grateful that my increasing light-headedness and racing pulse coincided with the end titles.
'I don’t want to worry you’ I ventured, ‘but I don’t feel too good.’ For the first time in half an hour her eyes moved from the screen to my face. I don’t know what she saw there but she immediately took control.
All credit to our fantastic ambulance service. Within ten minutes they were attaching cables to my hairy parts and loading me into one of their finest vehicles. And it was shortly after this that I was introduced to the world’s worst medical vampire.
It’s amazing what goes through your mind in moments like this. Of course I thought of my loved ones, and the fears that I may not get to do the things I want with them but the other thing that kept going through my head as I lay in Barnsley General Hospital with wires and needles attached to me.
'I wonder if the Beloved remembers we have an insurance policy that pays out massively if I’m confirmed as having had a heart attack?'
We’ll never know, as it turned out that I had no cardiac problems at all. Pills were dispensed, graphs were read, blood was (eventually) tested and in the end they decided that Vinnie Jones didn’t need to practice his ‘Staying Alive’ dance on me. My heart was (and hopefully still is), in the words of the doctor, ‘in terrific condition’, which was nice to hear.
I finally managed to escape A&E in the early hours, when the local drunks had turned out in force. My favourite was the elderly ‘lady’ who wasn’t causing any trouble but just wanted us to ‘give me my tinnies and turn out the lights’. Dean Martin never put it so eloquently.
At the start of the evening I was scared. By the end of it I was scarred but basically fit and well, but what had caused my anxious evening? In ‘A Christmas Carol’ Dickens made Ebenezer Scrooge believe that his night-time troubles were caused by ‘an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.'
It appears that mine may have been brought on by a Marks & Spencers fish cake and a dollop of my Beloved’s gorgeous cheesy mash.
© Shaun Finnie 2012
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