In the pre-dawn hour, as the dark becomes less sure of itself, I get up to go to the hospital. It’s cold, and I have to fast before this surgery, so I take my Lexapro pill with a sip of water right away. I was diagnosed with cholesteatoma before the pandemic locked the world in its grip, and went on to the public waiting list. The ENT specialist told me it was a routine surgery, a cutting away of abnormal growth behind the ear canal; decades ago, people died from this, their own skin growing into their brains. There was some risk of deafness, or damage to a nerve that could paralyse half of my face, but he had never slipped yet.
I’m the kind of man who assumes such odds exist to spite me, so I was not reassured. My fiance, Hannah, drove us to St Vincent’s at 6am, and the roads were busy, maybe because the restrictions were set to ease the next day and people couldn’t wait, or maybe because capitalism is a death cult that will brook no surcease, people gotta eat or work to pay the landlords,
Bloke living in first world country, with first world medicines, first world medical care, driving a first world car on first world roads, complains about what made the first world.
And, of course, having to pay – somehow – for your food and housing is pure capitalism rather than the human condition, innit?
He describes himself as a working-class poet.
There was a Monty Python sketch foreseeing that, wasn’t there?
“The man opposite me looked to be around my age, a young wog with a leg injury. He had a steady stream of lads visiting him, mostly wogs…”
Why hasn’t he been cancelled yet?
In Australia, wogs refers to Italians.
So that’s all right then.
On the sainted socialist NHS, he’d still be waiting for his operation.
At least Omar allows his girlfriend to drive.
As long as she’s in a car ten yards behind his.
Whining leftist shite would have a lingering death to look forward to under the socialist shite he so loves bites the hand that feeds him. Leave him to die–for the greater good of all.
Commander Jameson. The Young Ones had an episode about the People’s Poet.
He thinks he is a poet. On that basis I am a goldsmith. What a lengthy piece of self-pitying bullshit. He doesn’t even have the honesty to kill himself. If you hate everything about your existence so much that you feel obliged to write for the Guardian, why not take the easy way out?
Somehow you know that not a single word of this crap is true
TMB,
Italians call themselves wogs and do not get offended by the term.
A working class poet writes:
@DocBud – fair enough but that can’t prevent the cohorts of cancellations from getting offended on their behalf.
So lucky you are. I waited 18 months until my exploratory cholesteatoma operation, then having the diagnosis confirmed I was put on another waiting list for the actual operation. All the time I was having dizziness and feeling so unwell I had to have long periods of time off of work. Fortunately, my employer very kindly paid for me to go private, and I had my operation within a month. My surgeon had to carefully pick the cholesteatoma piece by piece off my facial nerve, and said it was as close as it could have got to me having permanent facial damage.
18 years later I am still fine, and am very grateful to still be here. Maybe the NHS isn’t perfect, maybe we should pay a little more into it, to make it better. But it is still a great deal better today than it was then.
“Maybe the NHS isn’t perfect”: necessarily.
“maybe we should pay a little more into it, to make it better”: ha bloody ha. We pour ever-increasing amounts into it and still improvement – if it exists at all – is spotty and slow.
We should learn from advanced countries with better arrangements – which are, probably, all other advanced countries except …
Chris Snowdon has a good piece on the NHS and how it compares in The Critic: https://thecritic.co.uk/who-do-think-were-kidding-with-the-nhs/
“Italians call themselves wogs and do not get offended by the term.”
And blacks call themselves niggers but will most definitely get offended if someone else uses the term. 😉