Medical notes part II

I am still in Bangkok, bathing in splendid torpor and reading a lot. Yesterday I played a game that entailed staying in bed all day and seeing which of a series of unlikely body positions would induce sleep the quickest. Prior to that I read all 650 stunning pages of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in one sitting, which got me sunburn and a headache.

Previously, I set myself the task of exploring the city entirely on foot, watched two dogs launch a guerrilla ambush on a third and then stumbled across a cinema and sat down to an afternoon of The Great Raid (great) and Harry Potter (hairy.)

My walking tour was curtailed by an aneurysm in my groin. Well, not an aneurysm per se but it might as well have been. My glands were swollen and aching. I managed to convince myself that I was probably dying and got a fitful night’s sleep, waking every seven minutes to inspect myself.

(Aside 1: The last time I had underpant discomfort in Asia I hobbled back to the UK with my tail and “the worst case of herpes” my doctor had ever seen between my legs. She was ultimately proved wrong through a series of elaborate and largely painful and humiliating tests. I was never in doubt, of course. That year had been particularly barren for me. My mum had given me 144 condoms for a ten-month stint in Malaysia. I came home with 143 and knowledge of the “posh wank.”)

So the next morning I was pleased to see that the swelling had gone down and I could swing without discomfort. BUT! the pain had crept up twixt my buttocks and was really quite sore. So I jumped in a taxi, ready to hear that I had an insect living in my veins. Or only a few days left to procreate.

(Aside 2: My medical history is largely the story of my backside. When I was only a few months old, I was laid on an operating table and force-fed a barium enema to highlight a fistula. Fast forward 23 years and there is a big black man shaving my bottom while I sob quietly into a pillow, prior to the removal of a pilonidal cyst.)

Bumrungrad Hospital is awesome. The first two floors have Starbucks, McDonalds and Pizza Express, it’s listed on the Bangkok Stock Exchange and is testament to how hospitals the world over should be. Within five minutes I was having my vitals measured and okayed, then a receptionist asked me what the problem was. I told him - “enlarged glands in the groin, painful buttocks” - which was more than his English could grasp. I said it again, louder. Then again. Then I said, highly embarrassed, “I think a GP will be fine.”
“OK , no problem sir … is a lady doctor ok?”

And after 15 minutes of questioning, medical history, sexual history, early modern history and the weather in Belgium, I am once again in a hospital with my pants around my ankles and a very petite, gentle Thai lady has her nose level with my arsehole, prods a bit, mutters sympathetically and diagnoses cellulitis and lymphadenitis, which will almost certainly clear up after a course of antibiotics. “Don’t worry! No more surgery.”

So if you need me, I’ll be lying on my front, inducing sleep.