Month: September 2008

The last time I went to a GP was in 1999. I was at university and I’d been troubled by a series of irritating heart palpitations which I put down to – well – I couldn’t give a fuck what they were down to, to be quite honest. I was 19 so they were hardly likely to be fatal.

But then they got a bit scarier and my lovely girlfriend-at-the-time, Claire, insisted that I Seek Medical Advice. So I did. Just to shut her up.

As it turned out, lovely Claire probably had a point as the GP sent me straight off to hospital for an electrocardiogram test and, when that wasn’t conclusive, an echocardiagram a few weeks later. And then more and more tests for about a year.

Long story short – you know the expression “his heart’s in the right place”? Well turns out mine isn’t. Not quite. And it only took them twelve months of scaring the shit out of me with phrases like ‘cardiomyopaphy’ and scrawling the abbreviation ‘?LVH?‘ on my notes in the hope I wouldn’t know what it meant, before they decided that I wasn’t going to drop dead at any second.

So you can understand why I’m not mad-keen on going to the doctor if I can possibly avoid it. A single visit can fuck up your whole year.

And so that’s why, when I returned from Vegas last week with a painful bumpy scratch thing on my forehead, I was quite keen to let it fix itself. It was a rubbish ailment and my own stupid fault. And like all self-inflicted injuries, it would go away in time.

But it didn’t go away. And then, in the last 24 hours, it got quite a lot worse looking and a hell of a lot more painful feeling. I think the medical phrase is ‘quite badly infected’. The sort of infection that has quite a long name and requires (grudgingly) the Seeking of Medical Advice.

Fortunately, on this occasion, Advice didn’t send me straight to hospital, but it has put me on antibiotics which means I can’t drink for a week. A fucking week.

Frankly, I’d rather they’d scribbled ?LVH? in the margins and handed me a Co-Op funerals brochure.

At least then I could have resigned myself to my ?fate? and spent my final week pickling my ?oversized heart? in gin.

“So, are you ever going to blog again?”

“I know, I know. I’ve just been fucking manically doing things for the last couple of weeks, you know? Two weeks, three states, and about four hundred blog posts worth of bizarre adventures. I mean, that twat in the hat would make five on his own.”

“The twat?”

“In the hat. You see – exactly my point. It’s bad enough that I had to be on my best behaviour that night, but not to have blogged about it the next day… I’m a bad, bad blogger.”

“Why don’t you just declare blog bankruptcy?”

“Ha. Like email bankruptcy? Just wipe the backlog clean and start again from now?”

“Sure. Why not. Save some adventures for the next book.”

“That’s not a bad idea. People will be pissed off though. They’ll say it’s because I can’t be arsed to write the four hundred blog posts.”

“And they’d be right. But they’ll also have to buy the next book to find out what the hell you’ve been doing for the last two weeks.”

“That’s a good point.”

“Thanks. Hey, is that a new laptop?”

“Bite me.”

I’ve been up to so much for the past week or so that if I tried to cram it into a single post, it would read like an extra verse of We Didn’t Start The Fire.

I’m back from the US next week and I’ll tell you all about it then. I promise.

Oh! No! I almost forgot – Lacy finally bothered her arse to review my book (which excitingly is now also available as an ebook from Waterstones.com.)