The years of pain

I remember the exact day my illness first declared itself. Twenty-seven years ago. Thursday 20 October 1988. My then wife and I were at a viewing of Harry Hook’s The Kitchen Toto at the Strode Theatre in Street when I felt a sudden, crippling pain in my back. Being 35 and a grown-up, I tried to ignore it. But the pain came back when we went for a pizza that evening, and I ended up crawling to the gents’, mewling and cawing.

It took me 11 days to summon up the courage to go to my GP. ‘I’m having terrible pain on the left of my spine. I passed something like a piece of liver in my urine. And I’ve got a lump on one testicle.’ The GP looked me up and down, as if to say, what is a young man like you doing in a place like this? ‘You’ve had a kidney stone but you’ve passed it,’ he said, at length. ‘And there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with your testicle. Now off you go and let me treat patients who are really ill.’

A few days later I left for France, to look for a house in which to save my marriage. By the summer of 1989, I had the house in France, my marriage was over, and my left kidney had collapsed and was threatening to poison me. ‘We need to take the kidney out fast,’ my French doctor said. ‘I’m sending you to Purpan Hospital in Toulouse.’

Over the next four years I was to visit every hospital in Toulouse many times. Purpan. Rangueil. Claudius Regaud. The surgeon at Purpan took out my kidney in an eight-hour operation. ‘Cutting through the muscles of your stomach was like slicing through thick dough,’ he said. I felt flattered. It’s odd how vanity and ego can so easily defeat common sense.