So, invisible traces of blood in my otherwise crystal clear, Chardonnay-coloured urine. Honestly, if it was in a wine glass, ice-cold and sat on the bar at your favourite haunt, you’d say to the bar tender, ‘I’ll have one of those.’ Yet, it was carrying a lottery ticket that I had to scratch off to see what I’d won. “It’ll be something and nothing. Plenty of things can cause a trace of blood in the urine,” said my wife, and although she is a retired nurse of 40 years standing, I somehow wasn't reassured. I think that it was at this point that I felt control of what was happening to me begin to slip away. I’m given an appointment for a cystoscopy at my local hospital, where my wife worked all those years. ‘What’s a cystoscopy?’ I ask her. “Oh, it where they shove a tube up your willy into your bladder, like a catheter.” I felt my face turn the colour of that ice-cold glass of urine. The first feeling of something happening to me that I have no say over, I don’t fully understand and I do not want. Like some poor soul condemned to be executed, I sense I’m being swept into a well-regulated inevitability. I then do what I’m sure everyone should not do, but nevertheless, they do. I googled ‘cystoscopy.’ You don’t need me to explain to you what came up, all manner of videos, animations, diagrams and comments, and when you don’t know enough to sieve out the false and misleading info, it comes across as all very confusing, adding further uncertainty. The trouble with me also is that I like to know all I can about a subject, so I can end up knowing far more than is good for me at the time. But I was sure of enough to know what to expect, and the day for the procedure arrived soon enough.
