The day of the scheduled pin-removal operation rolled around, and I cycled down to the RIE in the darkness before the dawn. The receptionist in the Day Surgery Unit told me to take a seat and wait, and so I did.

At about 11.30 one of the nurses took me through to a second waiting room and handed me a backless surgical gown, a disposable paper robe to go over it, and a giant paper loincloth.

“Have you ever worn modesty pants before?” she asked.

A bit of fiddling and a few false starts revealed that they went on like a pair of string bikini bottoms. (I’d like to point out here that I’m inferring this similarity rather than drawing from any well of personal experience.) I can report that although they may protect one’s modesty they do very little for one’s dignity. Had the option been presented to me, I think I’d rather have gone commando. Presumably this is the very reason no such choice was offered.

I was left alone for another 20 minutes or so and then led along to the anaesthetic room by the same nurse. To jump up on the gurney under my own steam and clench my fist to offer the anaesthetist a suitable vein was a far cry from being wheeled passively down the last time, when the metal had gone into my arm in the first place; this time round I felt a bit like the Dish of the Day at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, happily encouraging the sawbones to take a poke around my insides. I was hooked up to blood pressure, heart rate and blood oxygen monitors. “Christ”, I thought, looking at my 90 bpm pulse on the screen, “I’m going to have a heart attack. They’ll have to fix that too while they’ve got me under.”

It became a bit of a game to calm myself down, talking to the nurses and the anaesthetist to keep my mind off things, all the while keeping an eye on the ECG. I was at a rather healthier 70 bpm the last time I remember looking at the monitor. Not exactly Lance Armstrong, but respectable, I thought, under the circumstances. Eventually the anaesthetist told me he was starting the flow of the anaesthetic. No-one asked me to count backwards from ten or anything, so I decided instead to narrate how I felt as it took effect. “Wow, it’s cold. I can feel my vein inside my arm. And it’s prickly! A bit like pins and needles or something. It’s warming up; it must be more or less body temperature now. I’m starting to feel a bit woozy. Wait, am I? Yes, I am. Woo. I—”

In hindsight I must have seemed a bit weird.

I dribbled back awake in the day surgery ward. I didn’t have the same on-off-on sensation as last time, where it had seemed as if no time elapsed between conking out and waking up; instead, it felt more like I’d fallen asleep normally and had woken up after a few hours. A nurse came over to check me out and feed me some painkillers. A few hours later, when I was up and about and not losing my place in the middle of sentences, the same nurse presented me with my drugs ‘n dressings take-away bag and I was hurriedly discharged to free up the bed.

My Dad gave me a lift back to the flat in Glasgow and Ash kept an eye on me that night. I was a zombie for the next two days: the first I spent on the couch, comfortable in ascribing my lethargy to the residual effects of a general anaesthetic, but by the time I’d narco-slept my way through a business meeting the morning after (wherein the acquisition of our company was relayed to us, no less, and where despite my more than passing interest I could not keep my eyes open) I was starting to wonder what was going on.

“Seriously, I’m constantly on the verge of passing out,” I told a workmate as I popped another of the Tramadol painkillers the nurse had given me. “I have no idea why.”

And then later that day I looked up Tramadol. It’s an opioid, or synthetic opiate. “Ah,” I thought, “right.”

I took no more Tramadol after that, and coincidentally had a massive crap the next day. Yup, same side effects as morphine.

* * *

I was changing my dressings the other day, and I tell you, it’s pretty bizarre when the sight of staples in your arm is no longer a Big Deal.