Or they could do what the staff at the Lourdes Hospital in Liverpool did to me.........
OK, I wasn't desperately ill. I'd had an impacted wisdom tooth extracted in a long, complicated operation in the Warrington BUPA hospital. It was infected and when I saw the surgeon a week later he said my jaw must be cleaned out, under anaesthetic, so I had to go to the Lourdes next day.
I went in at 8 a.m. (no food or drink and a 20 mile trip - super!) and they prepared me for the op. After giving me my pre-med - 2 enormous valium tablets the size of horse-pills - some bright spark then decided I'd better have another x-ray. They plonked me in a wheelchair and took me down the corridor. Once in the x-ray room they pointed to the table and told me to get on it. I am 5'1 and the table was at least 4'6 high.
Have you ever tried to stand up when the bones in your legs have been reduced to the consistency of blancmange? I am convinced, to this day, that my knees actually bent
backwards. After about a minute of giving a good impression of Max Wall in Professor Wallofski mode I managed to clutch the table with both arms (my hands were just useless flippers by this time) and began to haul myself up. I eventually straddled it, face down, and then spent another 2 or 3 minutes trying to turn myself over without falling off. I finally achieved it, only to find I was the wrong way round.
During all this procedure I was watched, in horrid fascination, by a nun, 2 lay nurses and the radiographer. No one offered to help but I would have been eternally grateful for any sort of lifting, even a bump-up, rather than that horrendous (and, in retrospect, probably extremely funny to watch) effort. They had to lift me off the table after the x-ray. I had become a human jelly-fish by then.
