Stairlift to Heaven (2 page)

1. Do a crossword puzzle. My first job every morning is to cut out the crossword from the Daily Telegraph and prop it on the toilet roll holder in the bathroom. On average I fill in about six answers per visit so after about seven visits I’ve usually finished it. A word of warning though; if you have visitors who are likely to want to use the lavatory find somewhere to keep the crossword other than propped on the toilet roll, especially if the toilet roll needs changing and there’s only the cardboard tube left, as in the past I’ve lost a couple of half-completed crosswords that have been used as emergency toilet paper and have had to go out and buy another Daily Telegraph.

2. Do a few simple keep-fit exercises. However, on no account do any exercise which involves rotating the hips from side to side because if your waterworks suddenly decides to start up you might find yourself peeing on the bathroom floor, with all the subsequent earache from your wife that peeing on the bathroom floor inevitably brings with it.

3. Sing (daytime only). Don’t be embarrassed, people sing in the bath so why not in the bathroom whilst waiting to pee? I’ve been doing it for years and while my peeing has been getting increasingly poorer my singing has got increasingly better, so much so that Mrs Baxter next door sometimes sends in requests. For added enjoyment give some point and focus to your singing. I once sang the first line of twenty-seven Frankie Laine songs and it would have been twenty eight if the twenty-seventh hadn’t been ‘Cool Clear Water’, which set me off peeing.

4. Make plans for the day. On one waiting to pee occasion I planned to mow the lawn, weed the flowerbeds, wash the car, clear out the garage, put up a kitchen shelf and change a light bulb. However I only managed to change the light bulb as I spent most of the day waiting to pee.

5. Read a book. Word of warning though; be careful in your choice of literature. Over the course of four days I once read ‘The Exorcist’ whilst waiting to pee, but at times it got so exciting I carried on reading it after I’d had a pee and was halfway to wanting the next pee before I realized, and by then it was hardly worth while going downstairs again. So to ensure you don’t spend any more time than necessary standing at the lavatory pick a book you will be glad to put down after you’ve finished peeing. I recommend something by Jeffrey Archer or Jilly Cooper, or anything by Tolkien. Young boys with waterworks trouble should read Harry Potter. Adults who read Harry Potter deserve to have trouble with their waterworks and should be made to read a proper book.

6. Put a television in the bathroom and watch Daytime TV. The programmes are absolute drivel, but there is something oddly satisfying and not inappropriate about watching ‘This Morning’, ‘Trisha’ and ‘Loose Women’ with your dick hanging out.

But back to my bladder examination.

I hadn’t really thought much about how the nurse was actually going to examine my bladder but if I’d been asked to hazard a guess I would have suggested it might be something not dissimilar to having an X-ray of the digestive system after swallowing a barium meal. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

As requested I had undressed and put on the smock-like garment beloved of hospitals, the one for which you need the abilities of a contortionist to tie the strings at the back, and which, if by some miracle you have managed to tie them, need the skills of Houdini to untie them, and was now seated nonchalantly with my legs dangling over the side of the operating table awaiting the ministrations of the nurse who had been charged with carrying out the procedure. I hadn’t observed anything overtly pain-inflicting amongst the apparatus laid out in antiseptic neatness on the nearby table, so it was more to make conversation than a search for knowledge that I asked the nurse what the two long thin plastic tubes were for.

“I insert them in your penis and push them down into your bladder,” she said, matter of fact.

I blinked. “Down my penis?”

The nurse nodded. I gulped. “Both the tubes?”

The nurse affirmed this with another curt nod. I gulped twice, once for each tube. “At the same time?”

She nodded a third time. I didn’t ask for any more details as I was sure it would only elicit another nod and I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to handle the things she’d already nodded for.

“There’ll be a bit of discomfort,” she added.

This snippet of information seemed to me to be about as necessary as telling someone who was about to be hung, drawn and quartered that it wasn’t going to be a picnic. It crossed my mind that being hung, drawn and quartered might be preferable to the bladder examination, and I was just about to ask the nurse if this was an option when she went into action.

“Lie down please,” she said, snapping on a pair of rubber gloves in the expert way that all medical staff do, probably in the hope that it demonstrates their efficiency, when all it achieves is to fill you with an even greater sense of dread.

Although the nurse wasn’t particularly attractive she was still a young woman and I must confess that initially I was more than a little worried there might be some spontaneous and unwelcome stirrings in my loins once she’d started to handle my private parts. Believe me, after realising what the nurse was about to do to me she could have been as desirable as Angelina Jolie and assisted by Nurse Cameron Diaz on one side and Nurse Penelope Cruz on the other and my penis would still have remained as limp as Dale Winton’s wrists.

“This will help deaden the pain,” she said, spraying my genital area with an aerosol. Having done this she selected one of the pieces of plastic tubing and eyed me ominously.

I had no wish to see what she was about to do with the tube, enduring it would be bad enough, so clamped my eyes firmly shut. The nurse went about her business. It was immediately obvious that the moment I closed my eyes she had swapped the thin plastic tubing for a Dyno-Rod, for surely it was something capable of clearing blocked drains that she then started shoving down my urethra with gay abandon.

I had no way of knowing whether the anaesthetic spray helped to deaden the pain but felt that if it did it was wasting its time, for the pain was truly excruciating. When I was in the army a bloke in my platoon had been unfortunate enough to catch gonorrhoea, the symptoms of which he reported were ‘Like pissing broken glass’. By the time the two plastic tubes had been pushed into my penis as far as the nurse deemed sufficient I felt like I was passing not broken glass but broken bottles, and very large bottles at that.

The tubes inserted, I then had to stand up, my smock pulled up and gathered round my waist so that it wouldn’t foul the plastic pipes now dangling from my willy, whilst the nurse proceeded to slowly pump what seemed like the contents of Lake Superior into my bladder.

After about two minutes pumping she said, “Tell me when you can’t take any more.”

“I can’t take any more,” I said, almost before she’d got the words out of her mouth.

She pumped a few more times for good luck, hers, not mine, then, while I was still standing there holding the smock round my waist trying desperately to pretend I was somewhere else she consulted a graph on the machine that had been monitoring what had been going on in my bladder while she’d been pumping it full of water. After making copious notes for what seemed longer than the time it took Tolstoy to write ‘War and Peace’ she pointed to a plastic bucket. “You can empty your bladder in there now,” she said. Then, getting to her feet, she added, primly, “I’ll go outside while you do it, I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.”

She started to make for the door. I called out. “Nurse!”

She stopped. “Yes?”

“Nurse,” I said, with great patience, “I have just lain down on an operating table while you inserted two plastic tubes down my penis. I then had to stand up, still exposing everything I’ve got, while you pumped God knows how many gallons of water into my bladder. How could I possibly be any more embarrassed than I already am?”

She just smiled and went out. On her return she removed the plastic tubes. Immediately the pain, which had by then diminished slightly, became so bad that I almost asked her to put them in again. However faced with the prospect of walking about for the rest of my life with two tubes hanging from my John Thomas I managed to resist. A couple of hours later the pain had worn off to such an extent that it was only about as painful as hitting your thumb with a lump hammer.

I told The Trouble all about the experience when I got home. She was most concerned.

“We’re still going out for a meal tonight are we? Because if not I’ll have to get something out of the freezer.”

“What?”

“We were going out for a meal to celebrate your birthday.”

“We still are.”

“You can walk all right?”

“They put the tubes down my penis, not my legs.”

“Because the way you were going on about it I thought you’d need at least a week in bed to get over it,” she said, in that sarcastic tone that women employ every time men claim they are in pain.

I didn’t argue. I learned my lesson long ago. Whenever men complain of pain women always play the ‘pain of childbirth’ card and I wasn’t having any of that nonsense.

 
Note.
No experience is wasted in the writing game and I used the events of my bladder examination as the basis of the final chapter in my novel ‘James Blond-Stockport Is Too Much’.

****

That evening, when we went to the pub, the waitress was one of those young bare-midriff jobs. I’m sure the only reason she noticed me was because noticing old people who are awaiting the attentions of a waitress is in her job description.

“Do you have any proof you’re a pensioner?” she asked.

We’d been to the Red Lion a few times previously. The food there isn’t bad, although largely limited to ‘baked potato with’ meals, but the main reason we’d chosen it above somewhere with a more ambitious menu is because it’s within easy walking distance of our home, an advantage which also enables us to share a bottle of wine without fear of being breathalysed. A further encouragement is that old age pensioners and their spouses qualify for a twenty five per cent discount on Wednesdays. Before ordering I had thought it prudent to stake my claim to this right, hence the challenge from the waitress, which took me somewhat by surprise.

 “Pardon?” I said, noting that about three inches of her knickers were showing above the top of her trousers, and they were inside out too unless they’ve started putting the label on the outside. A few years ago women took great pains not to reveal Visible Panty Line, now they don’t even mind showing visible panties. I gave up trying to understand women long ago.

“Anybody could say they’re a pensioner,” said Bare-midriff. “I have to have proof.”

My first thought was to point to my balding head of grey hair, tell her at length about my waterworks problems - including that morning’s bladder examination - take out my false teeth and put them on the table and say, “How’s that for starters?” However before I could The Trouble, sensing a scene, stepped in and said, “That’s all right, no problem, we’ll pay the full price.”

“Suit yourself,” said Bare-midriff.

I couldn’t let that go without getting in at least one dig at the little madam. “We are not suiting ourselves,” I told her, “We are suiting you and your disbelieving nature; which is just about all I have come to expect from little minxes like you with a ring through their navel.”

Whether it was my little outburst that was the cause of what followed or if it was just because she was plain stupid I don’t know. Probably a bit of both.

“I’ll have a baked potato and beef casserole, please,” said The Trouble, steadying the ship, and polite as always.

“I’ll have the same,” I said. Then I noticed they had a blackboard special, battered haddock and chips. “No, hold that. I’ll have the battered haddock. With a baked potato, please.”

“We don’t do baked potato and battered haddock.”

What was this? “You have battered haddock, don’t you?” I said.

She nodded.