Not that it is a lifetimes ambition but at last Boris Johnson and I have something in common.  A week is a long time in politics but it is, if anything, an even longer time in pain.  A co-sufferer described her pain as ‘a constant companion, like having an unpleasant relative to stay’.  Indefinitely.

I bought Bill Bryson’s new book yesterday and it has a whole chapter on pain.  It is acute when you hit your thumb with a hammer but it is chronic when it is  like a burglar alarm going off in your nerves and not stopping. Very neatly put Mr B.

Several thousands of pounds since my last blog  I now have a diagnosis and a black and white picture of the middle of my spine.  There is an expression that says you should stop digging when you are already in a hole, clearly  unfamiliar to my GP who, following a telephone call from none other that my local MP, could not get on the phone fast enough to say now that we (I didn’t notice any ‘we’ when it came to payment) have the MRI she can fast track me to NHS surgery.  Obviously I have been too subtle about my loss of confidence in their ability to find a drink in a brewery.

So I am booked into a private hospital for four days next month.  After the investigations I was told there was good news (Nothing life threatening) and bad news.   I have to have a lumbar laminectomy.  (Look it up but DO NOT tell me what it says).   I asked the surgeon about the chances of a negative outcome.  ‘About one in a thousand’ he replied and even I didn’t feel it fair to put him on the spot and ask if he was on operation 999 at the moment.  Another doctor once told me that the possibility of my child being damaged by an MMR inoculation was one in fifty thousand.  ‘That’s great odds if you’ve got fifty thousand children’ I replied, ‘but I’ve only got one’.

Best news of the week is the post-operative care. ‘You won’t need much’ said the surgeon, ‘You could just book into a nice hotel’.  Not, I venture, advice you would get in the NHS.

Hopefully I am off to a posh care facility afterwards, with an in-house hairdresser and a drinks licence.  I look forward to welcoming you all there but don’t bring grapes unless they have already been decanted into liquid form in a bottle.  This is gonna be a party house, people.  Be there or be square.