One Lump or Two?

There I was, some months ago, in a foreign country, enjoying a nice cold Spanish beer after the rigours of lying on a sunbed and occasionally drifting to the pool, when a good friend asked me quite out of nowhere about the lump on my neck. Had I had it looked at? Well no I hadn’t. It had been there a few years but had, during the course of the year, grown a little and was making itself more obvious than I would have liked.

Lumps in places where lumps shouldn’t be are, on the whole, unattractive things. Once it’s a lump that’s grown to the extent that it scares small children or forces adults to stop in the street and point at the freaky lumpy necked man then it’s really time to do something about it.

It was a cyst. I knew it was, I’d had one before, right next to my nose. That had been spliced out of me by an officious, ball breaking female surgeon, and I have a discreet scar on my face to show for it. So I was unafraid of getting this one sorted out, I had just not been unduly concerned about it up to now.

All this resulted in myself and the present Mrs Hayward being stood outside a surgery in a surprisingly residential area of Spalding on Saturday lunchtime. I had been referred here by a GP although the whole thing was starting to become quite seedy and suspicious as I hovered by the back door ringing a bell. Eventually a nurse appeared and pointed me towards a seat in an unlit corridor and dashed off back down the corridor. 

I was left pondering whether there was some lump related emergency elsewhere within the surgery when, suddenly, like the Shopkeeper in Mr Benn, the surgeon appeared seemingly out of nowhere. 

Remaining professional as ever he called out “Mr Hayward” to a corridor containing just myself and Mrs Hayward, as if someone else may have been hiding under a chair. I stood up and was ushered into a small office, had a brief consultation whereupon I signed a form which I assume exempted him from any liability if he accidentally cut my head off.

I was then given some blue plastic shoe covers to wear, presumably on my feet, and was led through to the surgery. I asked if he wanted me to remove my jumper but he seemed satisfied that all was well and I jumped up on the operating table. 

The nurse was busying herself around the room and eventually approached me with what looked like a small shovel attached to a piece of electrical cord. 

“I just need to place this under your back” she said.

“OK” I replied, not knowing what this would be for, but then I’m not medically trained in such matters.

The surgeon casually pointed out to the nurse that she wouldn’t need this device, and she looked quite confused. I watched as she wandered off to the side to look at my notes and then it all became clear to her. 

“Oh,” she said, “you’re not having a vasectomy are you?”

I laughed, assuming this was some sort of joke to lighten the mood, but it became clear that this was genuine confusion and she had to hastily re-adjust the operating table and seek out the proper equipment. 

She even had to check the notes for the next patient but concluded the vasectomy wouldn’t be for that individual either as it was a woman. However this being Lincolnshire, who can say?

I would like to think that had she started to head downstairs, if you know what I mean, I would have pointed out the error of her ways but I have a rather dangerous habit of waiting to see how things play out.Thankfully the surgeon had more of a clue about what was going on and that, for me, was the important thing. 

The worst thing about the whole procedure was the anaesthetic being administered. I knew it would be, that was one thing I hadn’t forgotten about my last cyst based surgery some 20 years ago. 

Hopefully you’ve never been stabbed in the neck. It’s painful, even if the stabber is fully trained and only brandishing a needle.

Before long though, the anaesthetic worked its magic and I couldn’t feel anything so the surgeon got to work splicing and digging around and snipping with scissors. The sound of scissors cutting through flesh is not one you really want to hear so close to your ear, especially when it’s your flesh, but I was surprisingly relaxed, more by the thought that I’d had a lucky escape with the whole vasectomy thing.

The whole thing was over in a flash, and before long I was being sewn back up.

As I was guided out I saw my extracted lump sat on a metal tray, all red and gristly, about the size of a sugared almond. It was, very briefly, like saying goodbye to an old friend.

I drifted back out into the corridor and Mrs Hayward took me home. Within hours my day took a turn for the worse as some of the anaesthetic slowly wore off and a throbbing pain engulfed my head. I tackled the pain with painkillers and, when they didn’t work, with red wine which worked much better.

Sunday was a better day pain-wise, although I was now feeling nauseous and dizzy courtesy of the red wine/pain killer/anaesthetic mix.

Mrs Hayward was particularly surprised by the inch long row of stitches I have in my neck. She'd got it in her head that this surgical procedure would be no more invasive than poking around in your ear with a cotton bud so when I removed the dressing for the first time she began to understand why I was complaining about a pain in my neck. 

Mind you, for all Mrs Hayward's many positive points she can never be described as a modern day Florence Nightingale and for her the only pain in the neck she was concerned about was the one sat whinging on the sofa drowning out the EastEnders omnibus.

Thankfully the pain has now subsided for the most part and the stitches will be coming out in a week. 

A curious feature of all this is that not all of the local anaesthetic has worn off, some 60 hours after it was administered. A good part of the right hand side of my face and my right ear is completely numb still. It felt very strange to shave this morning when I couldn’t feel my skin. Very weird indeed.

I’ve posited to Mrs Hayward that I might have a personal injury claim as a result of this. Well, you never know, where there’s blame there’s a claim.