Dad’s night out

Two days ago I had my first night out since Harris was born. It was really quite dramatic, and involved both drugs and a nice blonde running her hands up and down my bare chest...

Sadly, this was in the context of being admitted to hospital... the drugs were painkillers and the girl with the nice hands was an impossibly pretty surgeon who was busy deciding how much of me she was going to turn into hors d’ouveres for Hannibal Lecter this time (it seems that every two years a different chunk of my insides is sent to the pie factory in the sky!). The most incongruous element is that I had a lot of fun; the team consisted of the aforementioned bombshell together with an eerily cheerful yet far too tired nurse who kept writing all my vitals in the wrong boxes on the form, leaving me with a resting pulse of 98 and a blood oxygen level of 67, and a diminutive Iranian health care assistant who talked geography and homesickness whilst taking my blood and explaining that it didn’t really matter which tube she filled first (despite the instructions to the contrary on the poster in the nurses’ station!), and all the time I was immersed in the world beyond bills, nappies.

What’s kind of scary is that the only person on the ward who was finding hospital as exiting as me was the guy in the bed next to me. His day out consisted of "worse TV, but better food" and the surgical extraction of the mobile phone he’d somehow managed to turn sideways whilst concealing it in his rectum from the guards at HMP Nottingham (he deserves a medal, it was a large Sony Ericsson, not something manageable like a Nokia). We sat, (flanked by the guards who couldn’t really go anywhere on account of being chained to the patient just in case he received a suspicious call) discussing how good it felt to be on the outside... the only difference being that his sentence is up in 10 weeks time whereas mine runs at least until the kid finishes university.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank ward C31 at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre for providing a degree of light comic relief along with excellent medical care... it would be really nice if you could start doing theme-nights!

DAD