Wednesday and I am awake early as this is not only Jab and B12 day but also Urology appointment day. My partner brings me hot water and toast to get me going and then foregoing my usual getting up rituals I shower. The shower is enjoyable but takes longer now that I have long hair, having achieved my ambition to have hair as long as Lucius Malfoy. So, clean and bright of teeth I set off to the GP surgery for my 9:30 appointment. I am not waiting long before I get called in and deliver my injection to the nurse. Its relatively quick but today I get the additional joy of a B12 jab in the let arm. So I walk away with to fluffy cotton wool clouds and a date for 28 days time to do it all again. I walk home collecting a paper on the way.

Once home I take some prophylactic paracetamol and get ready to go to the hospital appointment. I’m not feeling that chipper but I drive to keep my mind off things. I know my way to all the hospitals in the area now and have no need of sat nav any more. A small skill to put on my CV. On arrival my partner sorts out the parking fee and ticket and then we walk to Outpatients 4, which is a bit of a trudge through the hospital. I hand over my letter to the receptionist who tells me to take a seat, which we duly do. Its not long before I need the toilet and to my dismay the walking that I’ve done means I have a bout of Haematuria (pissing blood). My partner gets me some water and we continue to wait until moved to another waiting area. My appointment time comes and goes and my bladder doth protest again only this time I get a sample bottle which the nurse takes. There is still blood visible, this is not fun. Eventually my name gets called and my partner and I go into the consulting room. There we are met by a dapper bloke who asks how I am but he seems to know what he is doing. My sample does not show signs of infection, hurray a positive. We do a bit of the history and he pulls my scan up on the screen, even I cannot miss the big white dot in my bladder, in fact no could. I ask how big it is and the doctor bloke measures it. Two point one centimetres by one point two centimetres. “Oh” I say “is that big?” think to myself “That’s fucking huge”. The doctor bloke says its not huge but likely to cause “irritation.” Irritation! If what I’ve been suffering is an “irritation” I really would not want to suffer his idea of pain. We talk options. The bottom line is an operation and guess what it means a night in hospital, an anaesthetic, and the inevitable medical tool up my dick to, and I quote “smash the stone”. He puts me on the waiting list, says its going to be a while and that he does not do private work and to ring the Spires. He fills in an outcome sheet to take back to reception and bids us good bye. I leave, hand in my form and my partner and I go for a sandwich and drink in the hospital café.

I drive us home and get back to the sofa and attend to my life admin. There is an email from my cousin in Scotland who provides me with information for the family tree about his brother, my other cousin. I am taken aback to learn that he died in May 2021. I never knew and I take it as a sign of just how uncommunicative my sister was about what she knew about the Scottish branch of the family. I update the family tree and then settle down to start drafting the blog. My morning jab start to get sore as it usually does. I suspect that by the middle of the evening I will start experiencing the usual shaky response to the injection. All I can do is take pain killers and ride it out for the next 24 or 48 hours. I am tempted to give the co-codamol ago. So this is how I slide into the evening with football, reading and TV on the menu. It seems to me that I am entering a phase of cruise control and pain avoidance. I am not comfortable with that but I just need to hold on in there to see what happens. I will of course ring the local private hospital up to see if they can accommodate me any quicker but beyond that I have to sit tight. It feels like its been a long day but an informative one. Ultimately it will be night meds and bed for me and my two by one. I’m sure I will soon have a name for my stone.