In my old age, there are days when I am like the three invalids in "Three Men in a Boat" who feel afflicted with every known malady in the pharmacology - well, except perhaps for housemaid's knee.
Late last Sunday, things took a turn for the worse when my body began to itch and I discovered large red wheals down the right side (I removed the photos so as not to throw you off your lunch). We rushed to the emergency department of the Batemans Bay Hospital where I was triaged and then told to wait and wait and wait ... three hours later, after being told that they couldn't tell me when a doctor would attend to me, we left and arrived home again just before the witching hour.
We made an early start next morning to be the first in line at their outpatients department where a very efficient Dr Leerdam took one look and said, "Yep, shingles", and prescribed a 7-day shingles treatment pack of Zelitrex. The first and last time I had had shingles was six months after I had taken on a huge new job in New Guinea in 1972 - click here - which had left me totally stressed out and overworked.
The friendly lady at the pharmacy explained that if I had had chicken pox at a child, I was also likely to have recurring shingles. Had I had chicken pox as a child? I knew that just after I had started my first day at school I had had some sort of infectious disease, and while I was in isolation with dozens of other kids in the local hospital, I caught some more infectious diseases, all with German names, which meant I missed a whole six months of my first year at school. I would have had to redo my first year had it not been for my father who, from his miserable wartime pension, stumped up the money to pay a retired lady-teacher to teach me everything I had missed out on to get me into Year 2.
(My memory of that time involves a cute teddy bear which my parents bought me to while away the weeks in isolation. To avoid spreading any infectious diseases it might harbour, it was incinerated upon my leaving the hospital which became the first tragedy in my hitherto short life.)
I'm halfway through my forty-two tablets of Zelitrex and still feel a bit like the cover of this book - too fragile for any future repair - but Padma is handling me with great care and I ought to be around long enough to collect my OBE (Over Bloody Eighty) next year. In the meantime - and to forget the constant itching - I shall watch "Three Men in a Boat" again.
P.S. Some kindly disposed people, on reading these pointless bits and pieces, keep insisting that I ought to write my autobiography. I am getting my head around it and may call it "My Ought To Biography".
