Today found me back in the Outpatients West department of Bradford Royal Infirmary, a place I am becoming rather overly familiar with. Plenty of space to sit, but today nobody was offering me a cup of tea. I feel aggrieved by this as the old dear sitting behind me was not only offered tea, but a choice of beverages and seemed to spend a good five minutes describing in painful detail how she wanted it. Perhaps my lack of tea is the fault of the elderly lady, as the tea nurse didn’t wish to risk the trauma of another complex tea order. Personally I think the way I drink tea is perfectly reasonable, however I am always reminded of a particular client I used to visit. Their company administrator was that lady of a certain age who has a amazing memory such that even if months should happen to pass, she would always remember how one liked one’s tea. “Orange tea” she used to call it, in reference to my desire for tea which is well brewed to a strong liquor and then served with lots of milk. Anyway, I didn’t get any tea, orange or otherwise, and would like to use this forum to publicly complain.

As on this visit the television sported both volume and subtitles, I would like also to publicly complain about the inconsistency in televisual entertainment offered on my various visits. Today there was some program in which three people with their historic family recipes go to some posh London restaurant and fail to cook them quickly enough or prettily enough during a lunch service, whilst some italian TV chef buzzes around telling them how rubbish they are. The idea was that they were bringing their beloved recipes out of the family and exposing them to the general public, with the winning recipe ending up on the restaurant menu for a month. In the case of Grandma’s fishcakes, or Grandma’s lasagne, I can see that and sympathise with the sentiment. The third contestant, however, was a butcher. This butcher was cooking his sausages, they being a ‘family recipe’ as he comes from a line of butchers. I can’t help but feel that firstly his sausages are already available to the public, as you could buy them at his butchers shop and also that if he won, that would be a good way to make a lot of money supplying a month’s worth of sausages to the restaurant. I’m afraid I have no idea who won, as I was summoned just before the results were announced, but I hope it was the lasagne.

Today I saw Doctor Adrian. I actually quite like Doctor Adrian. Whilst he is a bit scatty and rather mad, he’s quite fun to have a conversation with, as he slips in his vocabulary between completely unpronounceable works and then into dumbdown words. He’ll give the name of some random procedure you’ve never heard of and then rather than say “under a general anaesthetic” he will say “you’ll be asleep”. Also the poor bastard is clearly embarrassed that he has not the first clue about what on earth is wrong with me and for my own amusement I labour that point to make him squirm a bit more. I suppose it’s not very nice, but I want my money’s worth out of Mr. Bevan’s “National Health Service”.

I was hoping to receive some useful results following on from the torture of the endoscopic ultrasound procedure last week and Doctor Adrian was indeed able to bring me up to speed. Unfortunately it seems that despite having an ultrasound to allow them to see exactly where they were placing the needle, the sample contained some lining, some muscle and basically anything but some bits of lymph node. Or to put it in simple terms: the whole sorry affair was a complete waste of time and effort. The position is therefore unchanged. We just don’t know. Could be lymphoma, might not be. Whatever trhe result, no idea what we are going to do until we have more information and we really must get a diagnosis.

 *sigh*

 We are therefore going to move to plan B. Plan B involves not doing another endoscopic ultrasound because it’s already failed once. Instead we are going to do something utterly unpronounceable, but I recall does begin with ‘M’. This will involve sticking a tube in through the front of my chest and down behind the breastbone until we hit lymph node. At this point, with the surgeon able to see the bloody thing, he will then get a good sized sample (he better, or the lab will likely say ‘we refuse to give a firm answer without more lymph node to test’) which can be used to diagnose what exactly is making my lymph nodes get all big.

 Sarcoidosis is still on the cards, apparently, despite my recent blood test coming back normal.

 We also discussed briefly my shoulder issue, but not much to talk about there really, as I will be visiting the ultrasound people to look at my blood vessels this coming Wednesday.

 So, now I will look forward to hearing from the thorassic surgeon. This will be a procedure performed under a general anaesthetic and will take place in Leeds, as they don’t do chest cutting in Bradford. I return to the outpatients clinic in a month’s time by which this should all be done and the samples processed by the lab. When I come back I shall expect the team to supply tea (preferably orange), hopefully a nice biscuit and, if you please, the remote control for the TV.

 [0] Due to a footnote writer’s strike, there are no footnotes in this episode.

Edit: The thing beginning with ‘M’ is mediastinoscopy.