Please keep your horror stories to yourselves!

Yesterday I was in hospital having what these days they euphemistically refer to as ‘a procedure’. I’ve had the same thing done a few years ago so I wasn’t worried about it in the least.

Well, I wasn’t, until I started to talk to my friends and loved ones, who saw it as their urgent duty to fill my tiny brain full of tales of woe.

What is it that possesses us when it comes to spreading bad news?

Why do we eagerly launch in and upset both strangers and our closest with stories we heard that happened to people we know that were just terrible?

In my tiny personal experience of being in Irish hospitals, the staff have been uniformly kind, patient, cheerful and expert. There’s a good reason why Irish nurses are so revered in England: it’s because they’re wonderful.

Also please understand that I’m scribbling here solely about a quirky tick of human nature and not of the recent tragedy at UHG. Nurses and doctors aren’t responsible for the law. This colyoom’s venue is irrelevant. It just so happens that I was going in to hospital, which was enough for my mechanic to set the ball rolling:

“Jeeze Charlie, good luck with that. Did I ever tell you about my knees? Well I was told I’d have to wait years for an operation, you know how it is, and then sure didn’t I get a letter saying that I was due in for the op on Saturday in two week’s time. Fantastic!

“So there I was telling a friend of mine who’s a doctor himself, about my knee op coming in so quickly, and he asks if I’m sure it’s on a Saturday, and I says yes, and he says well that's a bit funny because that orthopaedic surgeon is a friend of his, and he knows the fella never works on a Saturday.

“So this doctor friend of mine goes and calls the hospital and says he’s checking up for a patient who’s having his knees done on that day and they say to him that no, I’m not having my bloody knees done. I’m having an operation on a gastric ulcer. A gastric feckin’ ulcer?

“So he tells ‘em that no, I’m not having an operation on a gastric ulcer because I don’t have a gastric ulcer and whoever the person is who should be having an operation on his gastric ulcer had better not be having a knee replacement instead!

“So just make sure you read that consent form, eh Charlie? That’s all I’m saying.”

Thanking him for his sanguine advice, I wander off, remembering a similarly terrifying incident that happened a couple of years ago.

The Snapper was meant to have a procedure, but after fasting and waiting all day in the clinic, she was sent home as there were no beds. Some days later I was having a blood test taken at the same hospital, when the nurse asked me if I’d like to visit my wife.

“Do what?” I asked

“Well, she’s on the ward around the corner.”

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.