"A Hit...

...a palpable hit!"

Not sure what it is with me and the Bard at present. Does an unwell Englishman retreat into his ancestral past for comfort? Possibly so, but whatever the cause I do keep finding he has all the right words - and unlike dear Eric Morecambe of blessed memory all in the right order too.

The hit in question of course was a sword strike, first of many to come in Hamlet's last duel scene. It is this bladed assault to which I now refer. Once upon a time in childhood I had, as many children do, to suffer the thorough unpleasantness of having my appendix removed. My first taste of surgery at quite an impressionable age, and you'll not be entirely shocked to hear that the impressions as such were none too favourable.

A feeling of terrible invasion in the cutting of the flesh, wretched pain afterwards that would not ease and a wound that could not heal at all. No fun at seven indeed.

Then it transpired that to add, as it were, grievous insult to loathsome injury I had caught some nasty hospital infection, peritonitis had set in and - so I was later told - Death was already half-way down the corridor by the time nurse picked me up from the balcony where I was merrily playing at pushing paper airplanes through the grill onto the street below, grabbed me under her arm and, sprinting like a sterling rugby fly-half across the ward, threw me down onto the bed, ripped off my pyjamas in exchange for a surgical gown, thence more throwing onto a trolley and a belt down the Death-approaching corridor with the anaesthetist already clamping his horrid smelling mask over my screaming mouth.

On waking in dazed shock of course what did I find than that they had opened up my festering wound for another spot of surgery? That let me tell you was - and still is all these many years later - a heavy psychological scarring to inflict on a young and now not so young fellow. It may have been - was indeed - life saving, but it was a total travesty of all that medicine should seem to be. To cut a cut is a foul thing, even if the right thing.

And so where do I find myself now? Why in that very same place once more! All right, this time it is planned, it is standard procedure, but I will still once more have to bear being cut where I have been cut before. Wide excision following narrow excision as per the textbook.

First wound is healing quite nicely, pain is nearly done, and here am I about to say "Have another go chaps. Hit me once more. The scar shows you just where to aim the blade."

Not backing out of course, but by golly am I hurting inside. The screams of the seven year old, terrified and disbelieving, are as loud once more in my head tonight as they were in that dingy hospital corridor some forty years ago.