LIFE IN MY NORTHERN TOWN

FUNNY, isn’t it, how words come back to haunt you,

Only the other week I wrote about my tales of woe over the last calendar year and I ended the piece by saying things could not get any worse. Well, they did. I was in a pub in Manchester on a Friday night, when I was hit by a sudden, sharp pain.

Thinking that it was a pulled muscle, I managed to last the rest of the night.

Once home, the pain intensified and was coupled with bouts of vomiting every half-hour or so.

Rueing the chicken burger I had for tea, I assumed food poisoning and readied myself for three days of pushing my face down the toilet.

By six in the morning, however, I came to the conclusion that maybe this was something a bit more serious and it suddenly dawned on me that it may be appendicitis. I managed to get to the infirmary where my self-prognosis was confirmed and they whipped me off to Oldham Hospital.

A couple of things sprang to mind as I lay there in agony. Firstly the pain. Oh, Lordy, the pain – third only to childbirth and a papercut.

I thought a broken heart hurt, but this cocked a snook at that – whatever a snook is.

Secondly, why send me to Oldham?

Have we really diluted the hospital service at Rochdale to such an extent that they now cannot undertake a simple, routine keyhole operation that could have been done by Babar the Elephant with a scalpel?

Having spent the night strung out on morphine at the hospital, the consultant gave me the choice of having the operation there and then or chancing it in the knowledge that it would flare up at some point in the future and an operation was on the horizon.

As I didn’t fancy spending my birthday in hospital, with a surgeon rummaging around my inside looking for something that resembled a pickled chilli, I was out of there like lightning.

So that was my weekend down the drain, although on the plus side, I did miss the Royal Wedding.