Biopsy is a clinical term that sounds innocent enough, but it essentially involves sticking miniature drinking straws into your body and vacuuming out the contents. Since the MRI people had asked me along, I thought I'd better accept the invitation. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.
I was invited to a rather splendid new building, purpose-built for exactly this kind of activity, in which Madam and I were met by a delightful nurse named Kathleen. I became convinced she was as obsessed with puns as I am. As we left the waiting room and entered a corridor, she said, “It's just down the bottom.” I laughed. She then gesticulated towards a door and added, “You’re in here.”
I laughed harder. She looked completely baffled. I had to explain that we were in a Urology department, a place where the entire day’s agenda revolves around bottoms and urine, and she had just managed to deliver each commodity in sequential double-entendres. Kathleen admitted she had never thought about it like that before, and smiled.
Fortunately, Kathleen had all the professional qualities to make her the perfect person to have at my side for the twenty minutes that followed, during which time, thankfully, Madam waited elsewhere.
I don’t know if you are familiar with Britain’s 41st best stand-up comedian, Stewart Lee. (This deviation is relevant to the biopsy, so hang in there.)
... he describes an occasion when he was in hospital with a camera inserted into his backside. I should say that he had gone to hospital to have the camera put there, rather than to have one removed. One presumes, however, that they did recover it before letting him return home. In any case, he paints a picture of being incompletely clad in a badly fitting floral print hospital gown, with a fibre optic lead trailing from his rear, bereft of dignity. The doctor comes in and says, “It says in your notes that you’re a famous comedian.” He explains to the doctor that the “it says in your notes” qualification means that he isn’t as famous as the notes suggest, but then the nurse chips in and says, “Well I’ve never heard of you!” He says, “Well, I AM a comedian” and she says, “well you don’t LOOK LIKE a comedian”. He asks why, and she says, “A comedian should look funny.”
He reminds the audience of his posture and outfit and says that if he had walked in and seen that, he might have laughed. The routine goes off at a tangent here.
The Stewart Lee bit is important. I promise I'll get back to prostate matters soon.
There is another running joke Stewart Lee is known for. He frequently claims to have been mistaken for other famous people, most notably the singer from UB40, and the convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić. His delivery involves stating the name of the perceived doppelganger, followed by the phrase, "...has let himself go."
So, Stewart Lee will walk on stage and say he overheard some people who had noticed him, saying “The singer out of UB40 has let himself go.”
Don’t worry if you don’t find it funny. It isn't funny. The humour lies entirely in the fact that it is an objectively unfunny thing to say, but he says it anyway with absolute conviction. (And just to clarify, lest you are now lost: Stewart Lee was not the singer in UB40, nor is he Ratko Mladić).
Back in the treatment room, Kathleen's job was to sit by my side and say whatever was necessary to keep me calm and distracted.
Distracted from what, you might ask? Madam informs me that my predicament there is routine for women, who are accustomed to having medical professionals between their legs, with expensive tools and equipment. It is not, however, normal for men, and I was unable to lessen the impact of the occasion by drawing on Madam's experience. We men have equipment that is completely different from the ladies, and historically, ours is almost maintenance-free. Even at the ripe old age of 63, I can assure you I had never presented myself, and nobody had ever approached me, in the congress in which the doctor and I respectively found ourselves.
My feet were raised in stirrups and secured with shackles made from rip-stop nylon and industrial strength Velcro. My arms rested on open frames perfectly designed to be gripped in any tense moment. I had the option the shuffle about, but not to leave. Nurse Kathleen sat beside me, and we talked about anything that came to mind. It was surreal. I mentioned the film Hamnet, which Madam and I had recently seen at the Gala. I said that we were considering Wuthering Heights next Then she asked if I’d seen anyone famous at the Gala, so I told her that I had been there a couple of times to see Stewart Lee.
“Well I’ve never heard of him,” Kathleen said. I wondered if she might be the same nurse who attended to Mr Lee during his endoscopy procedure 20 years earlier. She used exactly the same phrasing
By saying that, she unwittingly prompted me to explain to her, Mr Lee’s hospital gown – fibre optic – loss of dignity routine described above. Kathleen listened dutifully, though she likely had no idea what I was talking about. Her brief – which she stuck to very well - was to keep me talking and distracted.
Specifically, she was trying to distract me from the presence and activities of the man, the crown of whose head was just visible over the horizon of my underbelly. I was wearing the standard-issue hospital gown, and I had, as instructed, bunched it up to conceal my gentleman vegetables, and the gown itself, from his line of sight.
There was a trade-off here. On the positive side, the portion of my dignity reliant upon the concealment of my gonads was strictly preserved. On the negative side, preserving it required the total sacrifice of the dignity reliant upon the concealment of that which lies below and behind the said metaphorical vegetables.
It reminded me of an anxiety dream I used to have as a child. You know those dreams of public nakedness? I hope you do. They are supposed to be normal, and even If I am wrong about that, as a child I had a dream that I was walking down the street wearing nothing but a vest. When I pulled down the front of the vest to cover myself, the back rode up and revealed my behind. When I frantically pulled the back down, the front rode up. I remember describing it to my children and how we all laughed. Never, in my wildest nightmares, did I think the situation would manifest in reality, and yet here I was, living the dream. But this wasn’t casual passers-by potentially catching an accidental glimpse; it was a highly trained professional squatting right in the firing line.
Kathleen and I were interrupted by the doctor, who raised his head far enough for his eyes to meet mine over the crest of my bunched-up gown, and said, deadpan:
“Ratko Mladić has let himself go,” the creases in his cheeks indicating the presence of a wry smile, and then he resubmerged to continue foraging around in no man’s land.
If you are a man, and if any of the above has put you off having your own coal bunker searched for intruders, I can assure you that it is entirely worth the indignity.
A couple of weeks later, I was asked to return to the centre, where I met a new urology cancer nurse, Gabrielle. She explained that one of the sixteen samples taken contained some undesirable material, but the good news was that it’s completely contained and has not spread anywhere, and it is treatable. Following a fully clothed bone scan, I was relieved to discover that, by volume, I am 99.998% healthy.
