I got to the hospital at just before nine o’clock in the morning. I persuaded Noy not to go with me because I didn’t want to make a big thing of it. It was a simple procedure, in and out and then home. If she had come with me it would have been something bigger, something more important, and I didn’t want to feel that it was anything other than a check-up.
Noy understood. Bless her. She kissed me on the cheek and wished me luck and I went downstairs and caught a taxi.
I was shown to a changing room where I took off my clothes put on a pale blue hospital robe. I was shown through to another room where a pretty nurse who looked about fifteen years old sat me down in a chair and put a needle into a vein in my left arm and held it in place with a strip of sticking plaster. There were two other patients there, a Thai man in his seventies and an obese Arab who kept wiping his face with a large white handkerchief.
Dr Ma-lee arrived fifteen minutes after I’d been prepped. She was wearing surgical scrubs and her long hair was tucked back in a net. She checked the needle and asked me how the cleansing had gone.
Ah yes, the cleansing.
I’d gone onto the internet to check out what was in store for me and pretty much everything I’d read suggested that the preparation was a lot more uncomfortable than the procedure. I had to drink the eight pints of solution that the hospital had given me, then wait until the eight pints had passed through me, taking pretty much everything with it.
It was not pleasant.
Not pleasant at all.
The first intestinal rumblings began about six hours after I’d finished the last drop and I spent a further two hours in the bathroom.
But I just smiled and nodded and told Dr Ma-lee that the cleansing had gone just fine.
She explained the procedure again and asked me if I had any concerns.
Any concerns?
Well, yes, actually. I was concerned that there might be a tumour the size of a grapefruit in my gut and that I’d be dead by the end of the year because, please God, I didn’t want to die.
‘No, I’m good,’ I said, and smiled confidently.
‘It’s going to be fine, Khun Bob,’ she said, and patted the arm that didn’t have a needle in it.
I guess my smile wasn’t as confident as I thought.
She went away and five minutes later two female orderlies in pale green scrubs came in pushing a gurney. They asked me to lie down and they wheeled me down a corridor into an operating room. Dr Ma-lee was there. She’d put on a cap that matched her scrubs and was wearing surgical gloves. She asked me to lie on my side and then she attached a hypodermic to the needle in my arm and I felt a coldness spread along it and across my chest and then I felt warm and safe and happy, so happy that I actually giggled.
I felt a draught as a nurse loosened my robe and I was still giggling as she inserted the camera and it began its twenty-two-foot voyage of discovery.