I'd done the Hospital Gown Waltz in the bathroom an hour before, arms outstretched as if embracing an invisible partner as I staggered around the room trying to get it to remain in place. It was hopeless, and I eventually dashed from bathroom to bed in a state of semi-undress, gown flapping around my loins.

Hospitals always take care to allow you adequate time before an operation to contemplate what lies ahead, giving you at least an hour's warning that they are coming to wheel you away. This allows you to lie in bed and consider the several hundred things that could go wrong, so you make rash promises to the Almighty as to your future behaviour if only He will ensure that you wake up.

Comes the hour and they roll me into the theatre to be greeted by the beaming face of my surgeon.

   "Hello again," he says, for we had both been down this surgical route two years previously. "Which side is it this time?"
   "Left side," I say, thinking, "Good God, if he doesn't know which side he's operating on..."
   "Just checking," he says, smiling.

It was a doctor's joke, one I would probably have found more amusing if I hadn't been lying in an operating theatre, about to be anaesthetised.

"I'm just going to give you a little prick," says the anaesthetist and my last thought was that if these words had been uttered by the surgeon, I'd have a problem.

Ninety minutes later I am back in my room wanting desperately to take a peek under the gown to make sure all my bits are still in place, but lacking the courage to do so. It was only a hernia repair but uncomfortably close to my more treasured parts and I would have been happier if they had encased them in some sort of scalpel-resistant steel mesh before operating - just in case.

I then realised I hadn't drunk anything for 12 hours, which prompted a darker thought to surface in my mind. In the course of my many hospital stays, I'd once been threatened with a catheter if my natural processes malfunctioned. I'd been so terrified of this possibility that I had spent hours recalling a visit to a waterfall until my recollection of that thundering image and its associated sound effects had the desired result.

No one had mentioned the "c" word yet. If they did, I decided I'd make a run for it.

Somewhere on the other side of the bedside curtain was my room-mate. I usually avoid conversations with strangers, but when you're lying in a room with one, you know that a friendly chat is inevitable. "What are you in for?" floated the voice over the curtain. I told him and I could immediately tell that he was unimpressed. Obviously, I should have picked a more exotic, life-threatening condition.

   "And you?" I asked.
   "Back pains, stomach pains. Had them for months,"
   "Oh," I said, recognising the portents of a lengthy dissertation on the mysteries of backache and offering my sympathetic ear.