This is a hitherto unreported reminiscence of my progress through the long and winding corridors of the unbelievably marvellous British NHS in 2011.

As part of my continued health care, I was invited to have a CAT scan at Salisbury District Hospital (my second home for various periods during 2010). The notification had been sent to me several weeks earlier and informed me that I needed to present myself one hour before the appointed time so I could be given a contrast drink to improve the pictures produced by the scan. I was familiar with this as I had had one in the previous year. It involves sitting around for up to an hour, sipping a milky substance, being bored out of your skull and trying to concentrate on your book, invariably with little success!

I duly turned up just after 10am, reported to reception and sat in the waiting room. I was so bored, I became enthralled by an episode of Property Ladder. Yes, that bored. At 10.45am, the receptionist smiled and said “You were a bit early, weren’t you?” I explained that my letter had instructed me to arrive an hour early for the drink. “Oh,” she replied and strode off purposefully, returning a few minutes later saying that my letter had been sent just before they stopped requiring patients to arrive an hour early and have the drink! Oh well, the up side of this was that I went to the treatment area fifteen minutes early!

The CT scan experts among you will know that the initial step is to insert a canular into a convenient vein in order that a dye can be injected during the scan. If you are at all familiar with my veins, you will be only too aware that ‘convenient’ is not a description readily applicable to them: they are either extremely shy or just plain bloody rude, because they simply don’t turn up to these events and no amount of violent skin-slapping encourages an appearance. The nurse gave up after one attempt and took me in to the scan room, saying she had called for a doctor to do the dirty work.

The six subsequent failures to effect an incursion (three in each arm) showed – statistically at least – that the nurse was significantly less crap at this than the doctor. Anyway, the end result was that the whole shebang had to be rescheduled and I left the hospital self-consciously sporting seven bits of transparent sticky plaster and more cotton wool balls than three teddy bears.

The new appointment was fixed for a week ahead but, in between times, I had a phone call to say that the scanner had broken down and could I turn up two days later than originally planned? So I did and, after three attempts, one was in vein. Ha! See what I did there? After all this hoohah, I saw the oncologist who told me that the scan had revealed a small (2cm) growth in my right lung which is almost certainly cancerous but also almost certainly removable.

I then had to have a PET scan at Southampton which will have given the medics pictures in glorious Technicolor and 3D to indicate whether the little bugger is the result of a spread or completely new, and help them decide the best way to deal with it. This time, I had to be injected with a radioactive liquid; I was wishing the medical staff luck in advance with the veins. I wondered if I’d glow in the dark, which would at least allow me to read in bed without a torch.

So, CAT scan, PET scan, presumably a LAB test would follow. See what I did there?