Saga

I don't suppose all sagas start off as sagas. I expect some of them begin

“This morning I woke up and proceeded to struggle with my trousers.”

and end up 200,000 words later with the protagonist in a large pot being danced around by cannibals and you put the book down and sigh because you're only two thirds of the way through and you mutter, “Saga”

So it it with me, cept it's doctors not cannibals.

I went home for a night as an experiment over a week ago and returned to the hospital the next day confident I'd probably be discharged the following morning.

A doctor visited and breezily informed me that the latest blood test had showed an uptick in my white cells and they were just going to keep an eye on that over the next 24 hours.

I was casual. After all was I not just an exceptional healing unit overall?

Then the fever hit and the exhaustion rolled in and I spent the next week in bed as doctors tried to find the source of infection and I went back to nil by mouth in case food had leaked into my chest cavity via inadequate stitching in the children's' purse I now call a stomach.

So a week and a bit later I'm sitting up in bed writing this and my surgeon walks in and asks me to give him a smile. He has no way of knowing. I stare at him blankly and state. 'That's not my bag man.”

He proceeds to tell me of teams of radiologists and himself pouring over the CT scan I'd had done this morning looking for a leak in the minutest forensic detail and where there was once one half of them say there now isn't and half of them say there's the faintest whisper of one left.

I mumble something about schroeder's esophagus and he doesn't double over with laughter so it's obvious I'm still very unwell.

But feel better that I have for the previous week, which was sick and tired and a little depressed with the whole isolated, uncomfortable, mammoth physical restructuring exercise.

However certain clouds have parted and that's as far as I'll go with that.

The world still owes me a living.