MEDICAL PROGRESS IN BRIEF

 

I don’t think we needed much medical attention as a family when I was young, but I may not remember many incidents.

All right, Nigel and I were circumcised, which was not uncommon at the time. The reason for it being done was, we boys thought, because our father, who fought in Mesopotamia (Iraq)  in the First World War, was disturbed by sand up his foreskin when fighting in sandy desert conditions. I wonder now if there was any truth in that.

My father running over my foot in the car I do remember, but the family diagnosis was that no bones had be broken. Were there any X-ray at that time? 

I was exactly 0 years old when doctor Daley delivered me on the 5th February 1925 at our house, Sawyers Lands,  Silchester.

Doctor Daley made his medicines in his garden shed. He never charged my family for his services as when he was at Cambridge with my grandfather he got into some kind of trouble (we don’t know what) and grandfather had helped him out. 

Iodine was put on to all cuts and grazes and stung like mad. Dock leaves were rubbed on to nettle rashes and butter applied to burns - something we do today with magical effect, but you have to be quick. 

School came and went. The war came and went. 

It was during that war (probably in 1944) that I crashed an aeroplane (a Cornell) and knocked two instruments out of the control panel in front of me with my head. I asked the ambulance driver who drove me to the airfield hospital just what had happened. He had no idea that I wanted to know what country I was in and had I possibly been run over by a bus. 

But I came around with no medicine needed and was soon flying again, having demonstrated my “bravery” to the Commanding Officer.

Than, the war over, I was about to be demobbed and wanted an X-ray as my girlfriend at the time told me that she had coughed up some blood.  So I told the medic that I, too, had coughed up blood. In front of a row of RAF officers (I had become one too) I was solemnly told that the minuscule X-ray taken had indicated that I did, in fact, have TB of the lung. 

The girlfriend was clear of it.

As there was no cure for the disease then.  I was invalided out of the RAF, given a 20% pension and spent time in a famous country clinic and told to rest.

I had not had much schooling, but was accepted as a medical student at St Thomas’s Hospital if I passed certain exams. So I spent some of my  post war time in the RAF as a Photographic Intelligence Officer studying at the same for the exam, and passing into medical school at St Thomas’s. 

But having missed out on education generally because of my service in the war I had to work long into the nights on medical matters, not resting enough, and so started to spit blood once again. As doctors were forbidden to practise should they have TB, I had to abandon a career in medicine. 

The nearest the medical world had as a rest cure was an artificial pneumothorax. This consisted of a hollow needle pushed between the ribs allowing atmospheric pressure air to fill a created space between lung and ribs, thus resting the lung. 

Because of absorption, this gap had to be topped up with air, initially weekly and latterly  fortnightly for 7 years. 

This was inconvenient if travelling abroad when it was often difficult to find a doctor who knew about it and had the right equipment at hand. 

I remember that at the American Hospital in Paris lying on an operating table surrounded by white-coated medics as this simple procedure was put into effect.

And not long after, I found a doctor Xalabadar at a house in a Barcelona back street who did have the equipment. This was a long thick needle with a dial fixed to one end that looked like a dial from my car’s instrument panel. Having ascertained that I had flown in the RAF during the war he refused to take payment. 

Later, it was discovered that I had prostate cancer. As treatment I chose radiotherapy which was pretty gruesome and horrid for Margreet. 

Part of the treatment was to pass urine through a tube to a bag strapped to my leg. When this became full and heavy I had to more or less undress and turn on a tap to empty it. So I had a zip fastener sewn in to my trouser leg, so that when I needed to discharge liquid in public I could unzip, turn on the tap and, next to a rose bed perhaps, admire the blossoms as the liquid took its course into the surrounding earth.

Now I have a pacemaker for heart failure and a host of pills for God knows what. 

Reminiscing about the advancement of medicine now, as I can just see what I am doing adequately, hear what’s going on, just walk a mile or so a day, do some shopping, execute my bi-weekly cooking, and still enjoy life as I down countless pills and drink plenty of red  wine, all in the company of my lovely wife Margreet, who possibly takes even more pills than I do. 

The world of medicine has advanced immeasurably since I was born. And I am deeply grateful for it having done so.