Nosey.

So there I am, lying on the bed, when this woman comes up and sticks a bloody great tv camera in my face. I mean, right in my face.

* * *

Ok, I'm being a bit disingenuous. That was after all why I was there, lying on my side in an out patients' clinic in downtown Leith.

A while ago, just before Christmas, I started suffering from indigestion, which I put down to my hectic, dissolute lifestyle and general seasonal over-indulgence.

A month or so later, realising that I was still suffering from indigestion despite being clean living and healthy, I made an appointment to see the doctor, concerned that maybe it wasn't indigestion. The very next day I saw an NHS Scotland add in the cinema that screamed "IF YOU'VE GOT INDIGESTION I COULD BE STOMACH CANCER!!! SEE A DOCTOR NOW!!!!!"

I spent the next two weeks convincing myself that I had only weeks left to live, planning my funeral and wondering about rewriting my will. Mostly thinking "who'll look after Talisker?!!" Curiously, though, one thing I didn't do was take any indigestion medicine, mainly because I didn't want to hide any of the symptoms of my impending demise.

The doctor, when I saw him, asked lots of questions, write it all down, and said it probably wasn't anything to worry about, referred my to a gastro-enterologist at the hospital for endoscopy, prescribed some very effective medicine and sent me away.

Five weeks later, I starved myself ahead of my appointment with the gastro-enterologist in the expectation of endoscopy, only for him to ask me all the same questions that my GP had asked and for him to refer me for endoscopy.

Which, ten weeks later, was last week. (The NHS appointment system is baffling. The gastro-enterologist told me I'd be sent an appointment for about a month later; when, six weeks later, I chased it up with my GP, I see told to speak to the specialist again, who's secretary told me I had to phone the central booking service. When I did, they said I could be seen the next, in Dunfermline, or a month later in Leith. Presumably they had spaces - maybe a cancellation - in Dunfermiline. But I couldn't help thinking that it was only my intervening in the system that had for me an appointment. A less pushy, maybe not so privileged, person might just have waited. They might have died before an appointment came up. Waiting for me to phone was hardly the most effective way if allocating appointments.)

* * *

I starved myself again, this time at their request. My appointment was for 1pm and I couldn't eat or drink anything for six hours before. I got up early for breakfast - they specified "a light breakfast of toast and tea only" (no coffee!) - at six thirty.

I was slightly early at the clinic, and after filling in some forms - next of kin, stuff like that (I assumed Talisker didn't count) - I tried to stop myself thinking about all the horrible things they might find in my stomach by looking at the very fine artwork they had on the walls.

Like this one.

It's by Robbie MacLaurin, who I've known for thirty years or so (though I haven't seen for about ten years!). I have a couple of his paintings.

There was another very good painting in the clinic by an artist whose work I own work, Paul Forneaux, but I can't find an image of that. Still, I was very impressed by the quality of the art on the walls of this clinic in Leith, and I'm sincerely impressed that Art in Healthcare bother to hang it on the otherwise bleak walls of hospitals.

* * *

A nurse than ran me through another set of questions in order to get informed consent and discussed various details of the process with me. Mostly, nose or throat. Endoscopy involves sticking a camera where a camera really ought not to be. This time, my stomach. (The only other time I've had it, my bladder. It was the most uncomfortable procedure I've ever had, including teeth extraction. There is only one way to get a camera into your bladder.)

There are two ways to get a camera into your stomach: through your mouth and down your oesophagus, or through your nose and down your oesophagus. For purely aesthetic reasons I reckoned the mouth sounded better, but the nurse explained that it was actually easier through the nose, plus they use a smaller endoscope (aka fucking great camera) and, if for some reason they have a problem going through your nose, rather than reset all the machines, they then use the smaller endoscope through your mouth. Win-win, buggy the sound of it.

The procedure is actually quite easy, but distinctly weird. Two different types of nasal spray - one to dilate the nasal passages so they can get the fucking great camera through, one as an anaesthetic. The sprays liquefy and drip down the back of the throat - this is meant to happen, but it is strange. Without feeling in the throat, the swallow impulse goes: it feels like the throat is blocked solid, but you have to swallow the camera down.

They push this tube through your nose and down your throat - SWALLOW - and on into the oesophagus, on into the stomach - and through the stomach into the small intestine. The best way I found to cope was to think about something else. Anything else.

It was actually very quick. Five minutes. That's partly because they found nothing untoward at all - no nasty infections, no lumps not meant to be there, no reason to plan my funeral at all. There was, apparently, some very slight inflammation of the oesophagus, which is most likely to be caused by than the cause of the indigestion.

I now have to go back to the specialist to try to work out what is still causing my indigestion, but frankly knowing it's not going to kill me means I'm not really too bothered.

By the way, I have been very impressed by the nurses and doctors who have seen me. Particularly the nurses. They've been great.

(I am of course going to die. But not in the near future. At least, not of anything that shouldn't be in my stomach.)