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Showing posts with label West Ham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Ham. Show all posts

Monday 16 November 2009

Guardian All Ears 14th November



For me medical waiting rooms always beg a kid with a chamber pot stuck on it's head but I had to resist the temptation this week...might just go & draw a random one now!

(article by Micheal Holden)
I was stuck on a plane for an hour recently while the airport authorities searched for a bus to take us to the terminal. As codas to already unpleasant journeys go, it sucked. I did however get to find out all about my fellow traveller’s toenail.

Man 1 “I literally hobbled in there. You could see it was the foot place-there were a lot of people in sandals. Lot’s of toes in big white cocoons of bandages-the sort of thing you might see a silk moth fly out of.”

Man 2 “Like a sort of Carry On bandage?”

Man 1 “Exactly. So they ask me what’s up and I tell them it’s an ingrown toenail. I can’t walk, and in the end it’s got so bad I can hardly sleep. So they sit me down in this massive queue.

Man 2 (eager for details of institutional inefficiency) “And how long did that take?”

Man 1 “Maybe half an hour.”

Man 2 (disappointed) “Oh.”

Man 1 “In the end this bloke turns up-quite serious looking, like a sort of gangster almost, He takes a look and says, ‘that is bad, mate.’ He says, ‘we’ll operate on Tuesday. We’ll take that bit off, we’ll destroy the root with chemicals and it’ll never grow again.”

Man 2 “Pretty brutal.”

Man 1 “ Apparently it’s that or a vicious circle of antibiotics. Anyway I’ve asked him if there’s anything they can do now and he sort of looked about to see if anyone was looking. Asked me if I was squeamish-I said no. Made me promise not to kick him-I said fine. And he just dug half the nail out with a scalpel there and then. I felt like screaming but I tell you what I walked out of there better than I walked in!”

Man 2 “And you still had the operation?”

Man 1 “Yeah, but they seemed a bit put out that the other guy had sorted me out first. One doctor said, ‘we don’t do that field hospital stuff here anymore-did he put a bit of wood in your mouth?’ I said, ‘No, but it was a bit Medieval.’ And then the other doctor says, ‘Well, he is West Ham.’ I said I don’t care who he is, it worked.”