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156
CHAPTER
TWENTY THREE
It was a month after the Goldnojaws affair when that the next episode in the attempt to get to
the bottom of Bond’ prostate troubles took place. The problem hadn’t got any worse but by the same token it hadn’t got
any better, and as Bond had finally been forced to admit to himself, was something that needed to be sorted out once and for all. The letter from the hospital had called it a bladder examination. Nothing to worry about there then. A bit dodgy-sounding, but nothing to a man who had already endured a bowel examination, a procedure that involved having a finger rammed up his anus, and some years earlier a stomach examination, a procedure that involved a camera being forcibly shoved down his throat. It would be difficult to say which of these two previous invasions of his body had caused Bond the most distress, the embarrassment of the former being about equal in intensity to the discomfort of the latter, but what is quite certain is that even if they had both been done to him at the same time the experience wouldn't have been one tenth as harrowing a procedure as the bladder examination proved to be. Bond hadn't really thought much about how the nurse was actually going to examine his bladder but if asked to hazard a guess he would have suggested it might be something not dissimilar to having an X-ray. He couldn’t have been more wrong. As instructed Bond had undressed and had put on the smock-like garment beloved of hospitals and was now seated on the operating table awaiting ministrations of the nurse who was to carry out the procedure. He hadn't noticed anything overtly pain-inflicting amongst the apparatus laid out in antiseptic neatness on the nearby table, so it was more to make conversation than anything else that he asked the nurse what the two long thin plastic tubes were for. "I put them down your penis and into your bladder," she said, matter of fact. |