War and Peace

158

     Then, while Bond was still standing there still holding his smock round his waist, trying to pretend he was somewhere else, the nurse consulted a graph on the machine which had been monitoring what had been going on in his bladder while she had been pumping it full of water. After making copious notes for longer than it took Tolstoy to write War and Peace she pointed to a plastic bucket. “Empty your bladder in there now," she ordered, then got to her feet and added. "I'll go outside while you do it, I don't want to embarrass you."
     The nurse made for the door. She'd only taken a couple of steps before Bond called out. "Nurse!"
     She stopped. "Yes?"
     "Nurse," Bond said, " I have just lain down on an operating table while you have inserted two plastic tubes down my penis. I then had to stand up, still exposing everything I've got, while you pumped God knows how much water through the tubes and into my bladder. How could I possibly be any more embarrassed than I already am?"
     The nurse smiled sweetly and went out.
     Bond commenced to pee in the bucket. As he did so a problem other than his prostate trouble, never far from his thoughts, chose to come back and haunt him. The small matter of his not having had sex for eight months. Granted almost six of those months he had been in a coma but that still left ten weeks, far too long a spell for a man of Bond’s sexual appetite to go unsatisfied.
     Almost immediately Bond had emptied his bladder there was a tap on the door.
     “Come in.”
     The nurse entered. “All finished?” She unhooked Bond from the equipment and withdrew the tubes from his penis. “That’s better,” she smiled. Now that the unpleasant procedure was over she no longer had to present the stern, no-nonsense attitude she had to employ when carrying out bladder examinations on male patients.
     Bond regarded her and wished fervently that she had been a Bond Girl. If she had he would have……have what? He wouldn’t have done anything, and now admitted as much to himself. During the past month he’d met half a dozen prospective Bond Girls and hadn’t propositioned a single one of them. The truth was he was scared they might rebuff him. He was aware that if they did it would only be because they were having their period but that didn’t sweeten the pill any, make him feel any better about the situation. So he didn’t ask them anymore. And remained celibate.