WHAT DO THEY WANT, BLOOD?

Every day, I have to take a certain amount of pills in order to keep me alive. Well, maybe that’s not strictly true, but it makes for a dramatic opening, and I’m never averse to a dramatic opening. Drag ’em in with empty promises of adventures and excitement and, once you’ve got ’em through the door, they’re yours…

Hello…?

Where’d you go…?

Come back!

Okay, so where were we? Oh yes. Little pills. Every morning, over my early morning cup of tea, whilst the rest of the household still slumbers, I swallow down four little pills which work together in perfect harmony to keep my blood pressure at a level that apparently should stop either my brain or my heart from unexpectedly exploding. In the evening, when I remember, which is not always, I chase them down with another one which apparently controls my cholesterol to such an extent that I could diet on lard and fried bread butties from now until doomsday and my depressurised blood will run unhindered as freely as a cross-channel train through the tubes of my arteries, unhindered by any fatty globules.

Or something like that anyway.

I’ve been munching upon this daily routine for some years now, ever since my operation, the details of which I’m not going to bore you with now, but after which it was discovered that my blood pressure was high enough to run a small power station from. Personally, I still maintain that the anxiety of the operation, the unexpected overnight stay, and the fact that I was parked in a fixed time car park had more to do with my stress levels that day, but as it took Doctor Dougie a good six months to get the cocktail right and bring my blood pressure back to something approaching a “normal” level, I suppose that I have to concede that there was something else afoot.

So anyway, here we are in our little routine. It’s all so very simple. I don’t even have to request the prescription any more, as the pharmacy does all that for me. All I have to do is roll up on the appointed date every eight weeks or so, collect my little parcel and, as the saying goes “keep taking the pills” and I’ll probably live forever.

Ahem!

HUGE amount of fate-tempting going on there, do you not think. Fear not, dear reader, much wood is being touched…

If you’ll pardon the expression.

Also, once a year, I have to write a cheque to the dear old NHS for my annual “pre-payment certificate” to save me a few quid on the otherwise extortionate prescription fees that I would be accumulating with my own little “five-a-day” medicinal routine.

Then, recently, and quite out of the blue, there came a message on my answering service: Doctor Dougie was refusing to give me a prescription for those little pills that keep me alive because they hadn’t had a look at my blood for a while. The problem is that, every six months or so, they are supposed to check it to see if my liver has decided to implode or something, and, somehow it had got to be eighteen months since I’d volunteered up my frail little veins for poking with needles and extraction of my life-blood to be taken away and mocked by technicians never likely to be known to me.

So, instead of sitting in traffic attempting, however futile it might be to try, to build up my blood pressure this morning (which will of course be quite some time ago [it was May 23rd] by the time I actually get around to sharing this story with you), I’m sitting here writing this rather than having to think about the needle and the blood and the whole horrible experience of being probed and drained by the lovely people who work in the NHS, just so that they will continue to dish out those little pills which have somehow become so vital in guaranteeing my continued existence.

See you on the other side.