In Sickness and in National Health

To show you that the Poem Shop is the place where you can come for verse to celebrate just about ANY occasion, I give you chapter and verse, well verse anyway, on Operation Hernia (of which I had two in the abdominal area). Readers of a sensitive disposition or with a low boredom threshold should look away now:

Though experience of hospitals
in this fair realm may vary,
for the patient to be etherised
it’s usually quite scary -

as it was for me November
when I was in for a hernia op -
they did not one but two at once
- like a BOGOF in a shop!

Apparently they photograph
the handiwork they do
and pin up the pics in the corridor
for all the world to view.

And so it was that the Other Half,
when he came to collect his wife,
was confronted with a side of her
he’d not seen in his life!

My inside-out, my ileum and,
no doubt, my duodenum –
The Other Half felt a little faint
and wished he had not seen ‘em!

But swiftly he recovered.
He said, “Let’s be on our way -
if we’re out in twenty minutes
then the parking we don’t pay!”

Clutching my bag and gory wound
so recent sewn together
I hurtled off behind himself
who was going hell for leather.

When over the hill, like Jack and Jill,
we sometimes ‘take a tumble’
but being Brits and full of grit,
we say, “We mustn’t grumble!”