Oh Dear! Only Two Days Of Mischief Left At UCLH...

Yesterday afternoon I was visited by the Very Pretty Bubbly Specialist With The Sectionable Husband.  Pleased with my progress she made to leave but then added:

‘Now you are avoiding sweet things, aren’t you?’

‘Given my confinement and that half the female nurses and doctors working here, including you, are drop dead gorgeous,’ I said, ‘that’s proving rather difficult.’

‘I meant sweets, sugary things, Mr. Gowans.’

‘Oh.  Does that include chocolate?’

It did I am afraid.  I have been blessed with innumerable visitors all of whom have brought me something.  Normally, the choice of what to bring me would be easy, just a flask of Scotland’s finest but now that I am boringly teetotal, my dear friends and family fell back on my notoriously sweet tooth.  Chocolates are available in Angola but I'm not really keen on Alex developing a craving for them.  He is a big lad for his age anyway so I don’t want him to add unhealthy fat to his bulk.  It would be incredibly insensitive of me to scoff chocolate in front of him while denying him the same pleasure.  At home, therefore, chocolate is a treat, usually given as a reward for sustained good behavior.

Unfettered by such constraints in the splendid isolation of the Infectious Diseases ward of the UCLH, I have indulged myself.  Naturally, I was now concerned that through ignorance (I was unaware of the beneficial effect sugar has on bacteria) I may inadvertently have been retarding my recovery and commensurately increasing the length of my incarceration.

They do say that people tend to nibble more if they are inactive or bored.  I was both so thought I would quickly tot up my chocolate consumption over the 16 days I have been in hospital:

6 packets of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Biscuits

2 large bars of Galaxy chocolate

2 packets of Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers

1 packet of Jaffa Cakes

1 Packet of Fig Rolls

1 large pack of Galaxy Cookie Crumble

2 Packets Cadbury’s Double Choc cookies

2 packets Cadbury’s Oat and chocolate chip cookies

32 bars of Twix (I like Twix)

That only works out to a packet of biscuits or chocolate and just two Twix per day so not really what any reasonable person would call excessive, and surely not enough to have appreciably improved the performance of bacteria, however voracious.

I have just been visited by the Very Well Dressed Lady Registrar.  Apparently I am to be transferred to the Royal Free next week to undergo plastic surgery there after all.  This is a bloody nuisance.  Apart from the fact I will lose my spectacular view, it has taken me just over two weeks to train nurses and ancillary staff to the high standard of personal service I expect. I  can change my own dressings, I get my cup of tea at five in the morning, I have extra blankets and pillows and generally get away with murder.  I now feel like a lag who has successfully ingratiated himself with the screws and enjoys all sorts of normally unavailable concessions only to discover he is being transferred to a gaol notorious for the brutality of its staff (for Christ's sake they flay people alive there!). 

I asked the Very Well Dressed Lady Registrar for permission to tremble my bottom lip which was granted with palpable sympathy.  I gave it the best I had, a truly RADA performance but it cut no ice.  I will be transferred, no doubt kicking and screaming constrained by a badly tailored jacket with a zip up the back and overly long sleeves similarly secured, to the Royal Free sometime early next week.

It has just occurred to me, with my international readership, that some of you may not know what ‘sectionable’ means.  To ‘section’ someone here in UK means detaining them under the relevant section of the Mental Health Act 1983 and 2007.  Under a Section 2 you are detained in hospital for assessment of your mental health and to get any treatment you might need. Anyone so detained is deemed as having been ‘sectioned’ and anyone warranting such detention is deemed as ‘sectionable’. I classed the husband of the Very Pretty Bubbly Specialist as sectionable when I first met her because, until I disavowed her of the wholly optimistic impression of Angola fed to her by her husband (who has never been to the country), she told me he had every intention of taking her there for their exotic luxury African holiday.  She has done so much for me so I was pleased to be able to return the favour by suggesting they sat down together to read my blog and delighted when she told me yesterday that they will be going to the Maldives instead.  My blog is, therefore, not only (I like to think) entertaining, it saves marriages as well for God knows what she would have done to him within hours of their arrival.  It is ironic to ponder that had he been sectioned, he would probably have ended up on the top floor of the very institution to which I am being transferred, which would have given me the opportunity, no doubt, to regale him with tall stories and repartee thereby sending him irrevocably insane.

The soup dragon has just been.  I shouldn’t call her that really because she is neither green nor huge but which child of the Sixties could forget the Clangers?  Instead of an inch in a small plastic bowl, she gives me two large mugfuls to nurse until the next mealtime.  They make the odd mistake.  For supper yesterday I ordered bangers n mash with baked beans.  I received a baked potato with cheese, beans and salad.  This evening I had ordered salmon filet and they brought me a multi-layered plastic package which, once I had fought my way in, I discovered was a Kosher salmon filet.  Can anyone tell me what the difference is between an ordinary salmon filet and a kosher one?  Or is it because we are in London where ‘kosher’ means genuine?  Perhaps that’s it, the salmon I was eating before was farmed while this, being kosher, was wild caught.  It certainly was better quality and the vegetables I noticed were more al dente peas than carrots whereas the goy vegetables I was being served before were more mushy carrot than peas.

Somebody left an unusual looking chair outside my door (I usually sit here during the day with the door open).  Fitted with small wheels, it was the wires and what looked like a control panel that sparked my interest and a desire to see just how painful shock therapy might be.  It was, I discovered, nothing more interesting than a set of scales for those too lazy to stand.  I have not weighed myself in ages but I knew I was well over 80 kgs and had set myself a mental target of getting below that as soon as possible (hence my restraint with the chocolates),  I was delighted to find I weigh only 78 kilos.  That delight was short lived when Her Majesty-Majesty, the nursey looking after me tonight (who bears an uncanny resemblance in both appearance and manner to Black Adder’s Queen Elizabeth I) pointed out that I could not count that weight loss as due to any effort on my part since it had been sliced off me 'and that my dear little Sir Thomas is cheating!  And we all know what happens to cheats, don't we?  They get their little heads chopped orf!'.

The temperature and pressure man came in at six.  He has wised to me taking a swig of hot chocolate as soon he turns his back on me after sticking a thermometer in my mouth and now uses a device that involves sticking something in my ear.  To be honest, that is pretty damn sporting of him.  Had I tried that trick with Nurse John Gray I am sure I would now be sitting uncomfortably with an equine use only thermometer shoved where the sun doesn’t shine. 


The poor man has still not cottoned on to my skill at influencing the readings of the blood pressure machine though.  By flexing my arm muscles at just the right moment, I can come out with some incredibly low blood pressures.  There are rules to the game of course (by definition a game has to have rules).  Any fool can muck up the readings but they don't count unless the nurse records them in the notes.  I was rubbish at this to start with and the nurses would take one look at the reading, think to themselves, ‘that can’t be right!’ and repeat the test, but I have had plenty of practice refining my technique enhancing it with deception plans and distractions. Today I watched with exquisite glee as the nurse recorded in my notes a blood pressure of 74/43.  A genuine reading this morning was 120/78.

‘That’s a bit low,’ I said.

‘Ya bin sittin’ aran too much,’ he replied.  How the fuck I keep a straight face!  Shit, I should have been a poker player.


An hour later the lovely Mia came on duty and marched into the room towing the temperature and pressure machine.


'It's been done at six o'clock!' I protested.


'I know Thomas, but since you're obviously not in hypovolumic shock I am going to do it again.  I also know,' she added, 'that somehow, you had something to do with it so lay your arm there and keep it still!' 

I half expected her to lift the hem of her uniform to reveal a cocked pistol secured by a garter to her thigh and say, 'If you so much as breathe your blood pressure really will be low!'  The girl is going to go far.  At least it shows that oncoming duty nurses review patient notes.


I really am going to miss this place, best few weeks I've had in ages!