NATURE'S WAY

Having reached my 10th decade, I expect to have a few aches and pains. I wait. They go. But Margreet can outrun me to catch a bus.

So when something does go wrong, it is quite an occasion for me.

For ten, perhaps fifteen years, I have had a lump on the side of my chest under an arm. It has just been a subcutaneous lump that I have ignored. It didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother it. Then it suddenly became sore and infected. A doctor told me that it was a cyst. I was given an antibiotic. (I have done my best to avoid antibiotics since they were invented to save up for when I really needed them.)

Then nature decided to take over, opening up to rid me of this nuisance.

There was quite a bit of medical interest. I was sent to Accident and Emergency for an operation. After a day’s wait a surgeon decided not to operate because of me taking the blood-thinner, Warfarin. He recommended that I have surgery at another hospital where they specialised in such matters. This was applied for.

And all the time nature was at its gory work with me making up primitive swabs and dressings with salty water, cotton pads and Micropore (my rather primitive approach, I thought, being better for allowing freedom of air flow than the stick-on dressings offered by the medical profession).

After just over two weeks of unpleasantness and manipulation, the cyst had virtually been expelled and the wound healed.

Nature had taken over (with – er – the help, I must admit, of antibiotics) and done its stuff. Surgery will almost certainly no longer be wanted.

I feel fine, and so well that I might now even run faster than Margreet to catch a bus.

Nature works in wondrous ways.