Hello, I'd like to introduce myself so that if I ever find myself posting here again, one or two of you might at least know who I am.
I've picked the username Lemsip because that was the substance that led me to discover I had PC. I've also decided to write in a grim, slightly pompous curmudgeonly light hearted style because, you know, you have to grin and accept it don't you.
I began my Christmas break from work with plans. I intended to execute various lingering jobs around the house, including applying the final finishing touches to the gaping wound in the kitchen ceiling. Fate, however, intervened. Almost exactly on cue, I breathed in a virus and by the second day of my holiday, I was afflicted.
It wasn't an absolute showstopper, I admit, but it was severe enough to drive me to imbibe the substance known as Lem Sip. (I must point out here that the budget supermarkets have their own ranges of hot lemon and paracetamol powders, which are identical in their active ingredients and entirely sufficient for the task).
The first time I took it was in the middle of the night. I couldn’t stop coughing; whenever I lay down, the hacking started, but when I sat up, it subsided. Resolving to let Madam Lemsip sleep, I came downstairs at about 2:00 a.m., made myself a mug of the hot lemon, and topped it up with a tot of brandy that had been strictly earmarked for the Christmas cake. It was a moment of recklessness and I regret it now, but at the time I felt no remorse. I retreated to the sofa and set it to full recline. It was the perfect geometry, elevating my head just enough to keep the coughing at bay. The Lem Sip—with or without the brandy—seemed to calm the symptoms, so I had another upon waking the next morning.
At some point later in the day, I decided to go for a pee, as one does in the lead-up to Christmas. Now, I make no apology for detailing visits to the smallest room, because they are of foundational relevance to this tale. I did what had to be done and returned to whatever sad, domestic activity I was engaged in. Unusually though, within five or ten minutes, I felt the distinct urge to go and repeat the procedure.
Funny, I thought, because with the exception of when one is out on the razz, where peeing frequency increases to discharge at roughly the rate of beer intake, one can normally go two to four hours between visits. Funny as it might have seemed, one is duty-bound to follow the orders of one's own plumbing, so I repeated the exercise and thought nothing more of it.
Days passed, and the cold did not subside. This was a persistent, stubborn beast of a British virus, not one of those flashy foreign ones like Covid-19. It wreaked havoc on my respiratory tract throughout Christmas, and I can’t recall anyone appearing to feel overtly sorry for me. Not to worry, I am perfectly capable of feeling sorry for myself. This was definitely a case of fully fledged “man flu”.
By Boxing Day, I resorted once again to that mainstay of modern survival: Reckitt Benckiser’s “Lem Sip”, containing 1000mg of paracetamol, 12.2mg of phenylephrine hydrochloride, plus ascorbic acid, sucrose, and aspartame.
That evening, at my sister's house, having consumed two near-perfect cups of tea, I once again did that most human of things and went for a pee. I returned to the sitting room to continue reminiscing about some once-good thing that has either been made illegal or will never come back. Fingerbobs might have been up for discussion, but I cannot honestly remember the specific grievance, because within five minutes of sitting down, I knew with absolute certainty that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was another pee. Once again, I thought, “Funny”, and once again I was compelled to do as I was being told by my bladder.
So, I returned to the toilet and did a perfectly normal pee. Normal in all respects, save for the fact that it came so soon after its predecessor.
I duly arranged to see my GP. I resolved to cut out the narrative detailed above, and focus on the correlation between the consumption of Lem Sip and double visits to the porcelain receptacle.
“Funny?” I asked.
“Funny,” he agreed. In our discourse, I learned the term “double voiding”. It is a thing, apparently.
The GP arranged for a PSA test. In early January, the results indicated that I had the level of an entirely healthy 70-year-old man. Looking at my photograph and my general outlook on life, you might assume this was perfectly normal. However, I am a mere snip of a lad at 63. The result was reviewed by a different GP, Dr. Abbott, who referred me for an MRI scan of my nether region. She very thoughtfully spared me from her digital rectoscope, on the grounds that the MRI would indicate if such a tool was appropriate, and there was no need for it to be used twice.
The MRI prompted the authorities to request what they called a “biopsy”. That is a clinical term that sounds innocent enough, but it essentially involves sticking miniature drinking straws into your body and vacuuming out the contents. I accepted the invitation. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say.
Had this taken place in a shed at the end of a doctor’s garden, at night, I might have changed my mind, but I was invited to a rather splendid new building purpose-built for exactly this kind of activity, in which Madam and I were met by an absolutely delightful nurse named Kathleen. I became convinced she was as obsessed with puns as I am. As we left the waiting room and entered a corridor, she said, “It's just down the bottom.” I laughed. She then gesticulated towards a door and added, “You’re in here.”
I laughed harder. She looked completely baffled. I had to explain that we were in a Urology department, a place where the entire day’s agenda revolves around bottoms and urine, and she had just managed to deliver each commodity in sequential double-entendres. Kathleen admitted she had never thought about it like that before, and smiled.
Fortunately, Kathleen had all the professional qualities to make her the perfect person to have at my side for the twenty minutes that followed, during which time, thankfully, Madam waited elsewhere.
I don’t know if you are familiar with Britain’s 41st best stand-up comedian, Stewart Lee. (This deviation is relevant to the biopsy, so hang in there.) There is a routine of his, available to watch here... https://www.stewartlee.co.uk/video_standup/the-joe-pasquale-joke/
... where he describes an occasion when he was in hospital with a camera inserted into his backside. I should say that he had gone to hospital to have the camera so placed, rather than to have it removed. One presumes, however, that they recovered it before returning home. In any case, he paints a picture of being incompletely clad in a badly fitting floral print hospital gown, with a fibre optic lead trailing from his rear, bereft of dignity. The doctor comes in and says, “It says in your notes that you’re a famous comedian.” He explains to the doctor that the “it says in your notes” qualification means that he isn’t as famous as the notes suggest, but then the nurse chips in and says, “Well I’ve never heard of you!” He says, “Well, I am a comedian” and she says, “well you don’t look like a comedian”. He asks why, and she says, “A comedian should look funny.” He reminds the audience of his posture and outfit and says that if he had seen that, he might have laughed. The routine goes off at a tangent here.
There is another running joke Stewart Lee is known for. He frequently claims to have been mistaken for other famous people, most notably the singer from UB40, and the convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić. His delivery involves stating the name of the perceived doppelganger, followed by the phrase, "...has let himself go."
So, Stewart Lee will walk on stage and say he overheard some people who had noticed him, saying “The singer out of UB40 has let himself go.” Don’t worry if you don’t find it funny. It isn't funny. The humour lies entirely in the fact that it is an objectively unfunny thing to say, but he says it anyway with absolute conviction. (And just to clarify, lest you are now lost: Stewart Lee was not the singer in UB40, nor is he Ratko Mladić).
Back in the treatment room, Kathleen's job was to sit by my side and say whatever was necessary to keep me calm and distracted.
Distracted from what, you might ask? Madam informs me that my predicament there is routine for women, who are accustomed to having medical professionals between their legs, with expensive tools and equipment. It is not, however, normal for men, and I was unable to lessen the impact of the occasion by drawing on Madam's experience. We men have equipment that is completely different from the ladies, and historically, ours is almost maintenance-free. Even at the ripe old age of 63, I can assure you I had never presented myself, and nobody had ever approached me, in the congress in which the doctor and I respectively found ourselves.
My feet were raised in stirrups and secured with shackles made from rip-stop nylon and industrial strength Velcro. My arms rested on open frames perfectly designed to be gripped in the event of a tense moment. Nurse Kathleen sat beside me, and we talked about anything that came to mind. It was surreal. I mentioned the film Hamnet, which Madam and I had recently seen at the Gala. I said that we were considering Wuthering Heights next Then she asked if I’d seen anyone famous at the Gala, so I told her that I had been there a couple of times to see Stewart Lee.
“Oh, I’ve never heard of him,” Kathleen said. I wondered if she might be the same nurse who attended to Mr Lee during his endoscopy procedure 20 years earlier.
By saying that, she unwittingly prompted me to explain Mr Lee’s hospital gown – fibre optic – loss of dignity routine described above. Kathleen listened dutifully, though she likely had no idea what I was talking about. Her brief – which she stuck to very well - was to keep me talking and distracted.
Specifically, she was trying to distract me from the presence and activities of the man, the crown of whose head was just visible over the horizon of my underbelly. I was wearing the standard-issue hospital gown, and I had, as instructed, bunched it up to conceal my gentleman vegetables, and the gown itself, from his line of sight.
There was a trade-off here. On the positive side, the portion of my dignity reliant upon the concealment of my gonads was strictly preserved. On the negative side, preserving it required the total sacrifice of the dignity reliant upon the concealment of that which lies below and behind the said metaphorical vegetables.
It reminded me of an anxiety dream I used to have as a child. You know those dreams of public nakedness? I hope you do. They are supposed to be normal, and even If I am wrong about that, as a child I had a dream that I was walking down the street wearing nothing but a vest. When I pulled down the front of the vest to cover myself, the back rode up and revealed my behind. When I frantically pulled the back down, the front rode up. I remember describing it to my children and how we all laughed. Never, in my wildest nightmares, did I think the situation would manifest in reality, and yet here I was, living the dream. But this wasn’t casual passers-by potentially catching an accidental glimpse; it was a highly trained professional squatting right in the firing line.
Kathleen and I were interrupted by the doctor, who raised his head far enough for his eyes to meet mine over the crest of my bunched-up gown, and said, deadpan:
“Ratko Mladić has let himself go,” his cheeks indicating the presence of a wry smile, and then resubmerged to continue foraging around in no man’s land.
If you are a man, and if any of the above has put you off having your own coal bunker searched for intruders, I can assure you that it is entirely worth the indignity.
A couple of weeks later, I was asked to return to the centre, where I met a new consultant named Gabrielle. She explained that one of the sixteen samples taken contained some undesirable material, but the good news was that it’s completely contained and has not spread anywhere, and it is treatable. Following a fully clothed bone scan, I was relieved to discover that, by volume, I am 99.998% healthy.
Hormone injection was this afternoon.
There is a final point that must be made here, directed at the men, and those who care for men. The yellow colour in Lem Sip is actually made from canary feathers.
The decongestant contained in Lem Sip—phenylephrine—stimulates the smooth muscles in the prostate and the neck of the bladder to contract, clamping the tube just enough to constrict the flow, giving the false impression that one has “finished” when one has not. In my case it gave advance warning of what would have come around in months or maybe years.
I am not advocating that men should experiment with Lem Sip. It’s not suitable for everyone and it could have harmful effects, especial ally on blood pressure. But if a middle-aged man chooses to take Lem Sip (or the Lidl or Aldi equivalent), and it has a noticeable effect on the rhythm of his Number Ones, I recommend that he informs his GP and gets that PSA test. It might just save his life.