It begins with an ache in my lower back, no more than a minor chord, barely a whisper really. This is an hour into the shift and not discomforting enough to stop me taking another call. An hour passes, the pain intensifying from dull to just about tolerable, like a librarian’s shush, or a muffled snare drum. I put it down to bad posture and peering at my laptop in a work meeting yesterday.

Boiling the kettle, ignoring the biscuit tin, I slurp my tea and check the time. Five to three in the morning and if the birds outside aren’t singing yet, the dashboard on my screen suggests 20 people are awake and the average waiting time is 9 minutes. 

During the next call, my final of this nightshift, what was bearable is becoming something else, the vocal closer to a werewolf’s blues, the rhythm section courtesy of Sly and Robbie.

A wave of nausea hits me. Then another. And another. I change my sitting position, try standing, stretch muscles I’d rather not, but there’s no respite. The waves are bigger and badder and they keep coming. I feel my concentration slipping down into the inky depths and try to bring the call to some kind of acceptable conclusion.

The taxi home is quick and the driver avoids most of the potholes. He doesn’t talk and for all these things I say a little prayer to Bacharach and David. Some Ibuprofen and two calls to NHS24 later, an out-of-hours doctor at Little France is giving me a painkilling injection, and we head home and I try to sleep, finding myself counting kidney stones rather than sheep.

A week passes; the kidney stone(s) don’t. We’re in A&E on a Sunday afternoon and while this isn’t quite “the corridor care” the British Medical Association will highlight in the news the next day, it is an eye opener. There’s a man in a wheelchair and a Rangers shirt who seems to have more plaster casts than he has limbs. Several folk have head wounds. A young guy sits between police officers. I don’t think he’s handcuffed but he is comparing misadventures with somebody dressed as if they’ve just finished a pint in Spoons and about to board the flight to Ibiza.

My threshold for pain, let me say, is laughably low and this episode beats even that of having a cyst removed from under an eye-lid, the memory of which is conflated in my phantasmagoria with scenes from Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. My Room 101, if I may mix the literary and cinematic references, will forever be a darkened room on the second floor of the Edinburgh Eye Pavilion. Rats not included.

Back in A&E, my name is called and I’m given a wrist tag (maybe I too will be boarding that plane to Ibiza), have blood taken, and am escorted to a cubicle where I spend the next 17 hours. A Nigerian doctor asks me questions, prods in a few places, and gives me a cardboard receptacle for a urine sample which an Irish nurse later collects. I’m staying put till they stabilise the pain and schedule a scan for which I need to be put on a drip for hydration purposes.

The latter never happens but that doesn’t stop me thinking about it as I lie on a trolley, covered by a white sheet with a dozen tiny spots of blood, not mine, while a series of other patients have their not-so-private consultations in the next door cubicle. One such neighbour is decked out like an off-duty clown, and has an intensity hinting at a less than idyllic childhood and ongoing mental health struggles. Swears he knows me from somewhere, a cafe in Leith? No, I’m not a musician. But turns out he is.

The scan shows a kidney stone of 4.6 millimetres at its widest, large enough to be of concern, but not sufficient for immediate intervention. I’m given a bag of painkillers but no suppositories this time. (What am I supposed to do with this? etc.) Another week passes, maybe two, and I go back to work, keep taking the tablets, drink enough water to drown an angry Pharoah and all his men. And somehow make it to Munich and back via Amsterdam and Paris to see a game of football I’ll never be able to forget; however hard I try.

An appointment letter arrives from the Western for another scan and on a glorious Monday morning in June I am informed that my kidney stone is gone. Seems I must have flushed it out, along with Ramesses the Great and his avenging army. I am grateful. I am exultant. I am whole despite part of me that was for the last month part of me no longer being part of me.

The sky is bluer somehow and the sun shinier and I want to sing The Israelites, that Desmond Decker song, but the horror show of today’s geopolitical reality wags its finger at me. And I wind down the car window and breathe in the fumes of Ferry Road instead. ■

Rodger Evans

Info: www.samaritans.co.uk