Too much information. That’s what you’re about to get. I wouldn’t read another line if I were you. I will be talking, at length, about my prostate and, by extension, my old fella and why I will not let the medical clergy anywhere near either of them, not the private medics or the chaotic maniacs who work for the NHS. I don’t mind whipping it out for you, though – and so this is an article which is both repulsive in its personal revelatory details and will also, if anyone takes it seriously, result in 230 premature deaths over the next decade or something. I don’t think it’s going to get me on the shortlist for the Orwell prize, then. But telling unpopular truths hasn’t worked very well either, so never mind.
We are all under a death sentence: I just prefer mine to be a bit vague and both unregulated and privatised
My attitude towards doctors has always been: stay the fuck away from them. Go to the GP only when you know what’s wrong with you, in order to procure the requisite ’scrip. Or, in fairness, for trauma injuries. I always considered them quite good at those, at least until I drove my car into a large tree and – following 12 hours in A&E and then X-rays – was given completely the wrong diagnosis. ‘Your shoulder is broken,’ one of them said, jubilantly. ‘No it’s not,’ said his colleague the following day. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’ is what I replied. To both.
I don’t know if you notice, but GPs score an average of three to four thousand quid on the cash-builder round of The Chase, only an inch ahead of teachers, who come across as almost immeasurably thick. We have been schooled to revere these people but I am not at all sure why. They are floundering in a fuzzy universe in which their algorithms work about 50 per cent of the time.
And yet consent to them sending you for tests and you will never, ever escape their clutches. You will live out the rest of your life being tested, waiting for test results, listening to their mistaken analyses of what those test results mean, clobbered by a terror of the dark which awaits us all and hopelessly in their thrall, believing that they represent the shining edifice of science.
They do not. They represent the slightly more foxed edifice of shit education and stunted imaginations and the affectation of wisdom. No offence intended, it’s just how it seems to me. And then they will zap you with radionuclides or poisons synthesised from a periwinkle which make you puke all day and go bald and give you an extra year of life. Gee, thanks. What a year that was!
A little under a year ago I had a conversation with my friend and colleague Giles Coren, who had written a piece for the Times about how he had gone for a prostate screening thing and they’d detected a tiny amount of cancer. Why on earth did you do that, I asked him – and Giles laughed and made a very funny (and quite correct) comment about my medieval lifestyle and how in some ways it was commendable but in other ways, such as this way, it was not. Trouble is, all Giles’s tests revealed was the intimation of mortality: you have this thing – it is of no consequence and requires no treatment, but we ought to keep an eye on it, because one day it might go bananas and kill you. More tests. More doctors burrowing their happy way up his arsehole. And all the while the worry must nag away.
Giles says it doesn’t – he’s an insouciant chap, as well as a lovely writer. But it would with me. It would cloud every second in a manner that the foreknowledge of my own death, which one assumes will happen in the not vanishingly distant future, simply does not. We are all under a death sentence: I just prefer mine to be a bit vague and both unregulated and privatised.
I don’t have much doubt that if I went for a test they’d find something. I get up every night at four o’clock for a piss and then return to bed, pull the covers around me and read for an hour, in preparation for my cosy second sleep. I’ve always been a bit useless at holding it in and sometimes, in my twenties, I would need the lavatory so urgently that I would unzip my fly and take out Cousin Norman before I had actually reached the pub toilets, which occasioned some concern among other patrons, especially women. Also, it is probably true to say that I do not quite have the – how can I put this? – ardour I had when I was 16. Sometimes I think that if Nastassja Kinski materialised in front of me in a leather basque purring ‘Take me, panther boy’, I’d only manage a semi. Both of those are indications that something is up. But both are also indications to me that I am 65 years old. A chicken for whom spring is but a distant, libidinous memory.
It’s more than that, though. We should take care of our personal health of course, but not to the extent of signing up to medical torture, to intimidation cloaked in kindness and concern – and pristine fitness is not the only thing in life. I agree with the chairman of the cancer screening committee who this week rejected universal prostate screening tests. Professor Mike Richards said: ‘The harms are that it can leave people with incontinence and impotence, and the numbers who will be affected by that exceed the numbers, considerably, that would have their lives saved.’
Quite. And if more evidence were required, I would suggest that almost every-body who has been demanding universal prostate cancer screening also believes that we should recognise the Palestinian state and haul Benjamin Netanyahu before a war crimes tribunal. Oh – and also this. That 12,000 men die from prostate cancer every year – perhaps half the number who suffer medical errors that contribute to their death.
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