Back to London again. This time for lungs. St Bartholomew’s Hospital where my late mother in law was a theatre sister back in the day. I think she’d be horrified!

First up lung function. This testing is as I may have mentioned requires the patient to blow into a tube. Easy as it sounds. It’s kind of nuts trying to blow slow, then blow hard with a clothes peg on your nose! No idea what all the graphs and blows signified but never mind …they told me I must see the consultant in clinic 1.

The oh so private ( not) cubicles allowed for a pause in proceedings as the lady next to me collapsed. Alarm bells rang. Doctors and nurses ran to assist and eventually moved her onto a ward for a full check up. As I later laughed to another patient, well that’s one way to get seen.

Next up was ENT – after waiting ages I got in for the camera nose throat thing. The very nice doctor and his team decided that the jaw surgery seems to have caused issues with my sinus’ . No shit Sherlock. I have said that consistently for …oh let me see now….371 days exactly now. No rush. They said I needed all sorts of new drugs and stuff and had to see the consultant in Clinic 1.

They also said I needed a CT scan- head scan. – marvellous that’ll be in a year or so.

Clinic 1 had no record of me, the lung function nor the ENT. They concluded it’d be best to leave it to another day. After all patients can just turn up anytime any day.

Next up: the pharmacy queue.Not so much a queue as a raffle. You clutch your ticket like a hopeful contestant at a village fete, waiting for your number to be called. I was 998.The lady next to me and I had reached that peculiar state only hospitals can induce, where every minor absurdity becomes hysterically funny. Every time the numbers appeared to go backwards, we’d collapse into fits of laughter.Then a gentleman nearby began coughing with such enthusiasm that it sounded as though he was attempting to turn himself inside out. We exchanged worried glances about catching whatever lurgy he’d brought along. Then we laughed again.It’s gallows humour. After long enough in an institution, sanity becomes optional.Four hours in, we’d become comrades. Fellow inmates. Veterans of the Waiting Wars.Eventually a voice crackled over the tannoy:”Nine hundred and ninety-eight… Jacqueline Emkin.””That’ll be me,” I announced to my fellow prisoner.Not my name but never mind. It will be me. I’d won the bottom prize.Drugs.God, how we laughed.By this stage One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest seemed less a work of fiction and more a documentary. At any moment I expected Nurse Ratched to appear and bark:”The only way to deal with patients is absolute consistency. Rigid routines. Strict enforcement.”We would, of course, have been too exhausted to resist.Four hours and a bit after arriving, I finally emerged into the damp London streets, the Smithfield meat market closing the shutters of great carcass’ of cow enough to make anyone go veggie. , clutching my pharmaceutical winnings like a triumphant raffle champion.First prize: a hamper.Second prize: champagne.Nine hundred and ninety-eighth prize: drugs and the creeping suspicion that the inmates are running the asylum.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, no, I haven’t been back to Luton Max Fax, despite the surgeon’s diktat that I should be reviewed four weeks after surgery.And no, Mrs Restorative hasn’t seen me either. In fact, neither she nor her office has replied to a single email.No surprises there. It appears we’re operating under the increasingly popular “ignorance is bliss” model of patient care. If nobody responds, nobody has to deal with the problem. Brilliant, really.Meanwhile, I remain unsighted, unreplied to and apparently restored entirely through the power of administrative silence. With no teeth to work with and a numb jaw. Who cares.