Picture the scene, if you will. It's Thursday evening, and I have just prepared, cooked and consumed a very nice sausage sandwich. Hell, I've even washed up the grill pan.
About an hour later, I start to get a tight feeling around my chest and back. Assuming it's probably just wind or heartburn, I shrug it off and go to my girlfriend's house. I drink a beer to try and burp the bad gas out of my body. The burping started as planned. And didn't stop. An hour later, came the vomiting, everything from water, to food, to acid to the point where I was still going through the motions but there was nothing left to give.
In the meantime, the pain around my chest and back is getting worse, like a tight band being pulled even tighter. It was at this point, after much nagging, that I finally allowed my better half to ring NHS Direct. It's a good job she did too, because after several minutes of questioning and hearing me slowly dying in the background, the operator suspected a possible heart attack (by now I was also very short of breath) and dispatched an ambulance, post haste.
In actual fact, two turned up - the rapid response team and the 'proper' ambulance. After some more questioning and endless details-taking (we were literally sat in the back of the ambulance, NOT MOVING, for nearly half an hour while a fully trained paramedic took down all my personal details on a glorified laptop) we made our way to North Tees Hospital.
After spending several hours in A&E, several hours on an emergency assessment ward, and another half hour on my actual ward, I was admitted properly and permitted to go to bed (at around 5 a.m.), but not before I insisted on my painkillers that I'd been waiting seven hours for.
To cut a long story short, it wasn't a heart attack. It was a massive stone in my gallbladder. A gallbladder which was also infected. On top of that, the doctor said he'd found 'fatty tissue on my liver which may become a problem in 10 or 20 years if you don't lose weight and change your diet'. Excellent. After 2 days in the hospital, they let me go home. I'm now enjoying a few days of bedrest and moving about gingerly due to the pain that still exists in my side.
Thanks to that pesky gallbladder, I've had to turn down free tickets to a comedy show, cancel my own comedy gig on Wednesday and delay our move to London until the New Year.
On top of that, I now have to eat bland, low-fat food, lose a couple of stone, and go back to the hospital next month to see if they're gonna whip the gallbladder out.
So I'm blaming the sausage sandwich. That and the several thousand others I've eaten in the last thirty-odd years. I guess the party's over....
