Country Living with Francis Farragher

Generalisations are dangerous, and probably disturbingly inaccurate too, but I’m inclined to align with the view that men tend to be very impatient patients when it comes to things like hospitalisation or being laid low at home for a couple of days.

There is also the rather serious issue of ‘male hypochondria’, where even the merest sniffle, a creaking joint or a second-long wind pain, can be taken as a definite sign of impending doom.

I find it hard to pick up a newspaper or magazine without being sucked into the ‘doctor page’ where, almost every time, I can make a personal connection with the condition being focused on.

Of course, we all have to accept our own finitude and despite any pristine regime of health, fitness and diet we embrace, our day, date and time will arrive someday but as in the line from the TV ad [hopefully]: “Not for a long time yet.”

We do tend to hear of all the bad stories about health services and hospitals including lengthy waiting times for procedures; patients being stuck in ED trolleys for hours, maybe even days; and of course, the occasional – thankfully rare enough – disaster when a life is lost that could have been saved.

And yet despite all that mix of anxiety and sometimes irrational fears, I’ve been lucky enough to have very reassuring flirtations with places like the Galway Clinic, the Bons Secours and of course, the ‘big one’ University Hospital Galway, known to us all of a certain generation as ‘The Regional’.

Many decades back, I remember my mother – a woman of the land – taking ill in a beet field with a pain that left her very close to passing out, before eventually being rushed to ‘The Regional’ for a gall bladder operation. Thankfully, she was caught just in the nick of time, operated on successfully, and two weeks later rejoined the family on the home patch.

The whole episode did have a bonus spin-off for myself in that I was kept home from primary school – either in fifth or sixth class at the time – to essentially take charge of domestic duties such as preparing dinners, ‘washing and drying the delph’ as well as emptying the ashes and keeping the turf in.

In hindsight, that couple of weeks at home was equivalent to a one-year long course in domestic science, but of course at that time, the big attraction was in missing out on two weeks at school. Back in the day, there was no great ‘grá’ for the school life, and how things have changed since then.