Infamy

6th Aug 2008

Infamy! Infamy!

The NHS have got it infamy.

First, they tried to kill me. They’ll deny it of course. A diagnostic test, they called it. But I know better. I saw the murderous gleam in the eye of the nurse as she increased the speed of the treadmill. My own fault really. I should never have told her I was a ‘Villa’ fan while we were waiting for the doctor to attend. I’m sure I saw her smirking as she started to twiddle with her dials – bloody ‘Blues’ supporter!

‘We’ll start off slowly’, she said. ‘Then gradually increase the speed until you ask us to stop – or you collapse.’

She tried to pretend it was a joke.

‘Bitch!’

I concentrated on staying calm. My legs were pumping furiously but I tried to switch my mind away from what my body was doing and remain cool, keeping my breathing steady. It seemed to be working.

‘Nice steady heartbeat’, she said

‘I’ll just increase the speed slightly. We need to try and work your heart’

‘F*ckin’ Bitch!,

I turned back to my Yoga thoughts. The treadmill was getting faster. Not only that, but I seemed to be running uphill now.

‘Hhmm!’ she said, watching the ECG trace ‘Still quite steady. I’ll just increase the speed a bit more’

‘B*stard, F*ckin’ Bitch!’

By now I was sweating. Even my eyebrows were sweating. It was dripping off me. Each time my foot landed on the treadmill, the speed of the thing whipped it away from me. I had started the test standing upright, hands loosely gripping the horizontal bar in front of me. Now, as the treadmill got faster and faster I was almost doing a superman impression.. I detached my mind from my body and kept focussed on keeping my breathing slow and steady.

‘Do you do exercise a lot?’ Asked my tormentor ‘Only your heart rhythm is still looking pretty comfortable’, she said, as she prepared to increase the speed yet again..

‘We need to try and put your heart under some strain’

‘F*ck off, you carrot-headed b*stard’, I thought – I was incapable of speech by this stage.

A few more minutes of this torture and

‘Right’, she said – a note of disappointment in her voice that her attempt to kill me had failed – ‘I’ll just start slowing the machine down now.’

It was as I supped my 3rd pint of ale in the pub on the way home from the hospital (I needed to replenish the amount of body fluid the bitch had sweated out of me) that it struck me. That bloody great handlebar moustache she kept fiddling with when she wasn’t fiddling with the dials of that bloody treadmill. Why hadn’t I seen it before? What other nurse did I know with a bloody great mouser? Apart from the colour of the hair, they could have been twins!

‘Ere. Nosey – you got a sister ?