HEART BEAT:I AM usually one for the frugal breakfast. Whether that has been by choice I am not quite sure. Full Irish breakfasts were a rarity enjoyed only on odd occasions like a blue moon, writes Maurice Neligan
I did get to break out occasionally on holidays or in hotels, but the seeds of guilt were sown in my psyche; the Highest Authority (HA) had ruled they were bad for me.
Accordingly, it was a pleasant surprise to find myself proffered a full Irish of major proportion the other morning. Sausages, rashers, black and white pudding were all there in abundance and I was encouraged to eat my fill. The rationale of course was that the whole business of throwing away perfectly good food was anathema to the HA. Why on earth, she wondered, would anybody do that when there was an underfed human dustbin to hand?
On the day of the big disaster when our hams were ordered to be destroyed, I had been shopping, well supervised by the HA. In other words I was allowed push the trolley. I became engrossed in a little human drama being played out before my eyes. A lady had taken some bacon from the shelf and put it in the trolley. Whereupon himself, without any sign of fear, replaced it upon the shelf and took a much larger piece. This charade played out twice and eventually the lady just shrugged and left him in possession of the field. I was tempted to warn him as to what would happen next as I had trodden this particular battlefield before. Quite simply, instead of the satisfying meal he would expect to get from his larger moiety, he would get bacon in minuscule amounts for the next three or four days. Some guys just never learn. In any case she looked like one of those caring helpmeets who would have thrown it out in front of his rumbling stomach and told him sweetly that she was only looking after his health.
This episode featured my old friends the dioxins. I am not going to explain to you all what they are, save to say that there is very little evidence to show that other than in massive doses they cause much harm. They have been around since the dawn of time and will be with us for the foreseeable future. It is a matter of choice as to whether you believe they are bad for you. You can choose to believe that they might give you cancer in the distant future. It's a free country. There is not much to be gained by pointing out that you may develop a cancer in any case.
"It was that bloody ham we had at Christmas 2008" you can confidently instruct your lawyer. Well, I suppose we all have to live.
Time was I used to write about how hard weather and frost brought a share of fractures of hips and arms to AE units and placed further strains on these units.
Incidentally, it is true to say that there has been no overall improvement in this scandalous situation since the Minister declared it a national emergency in 2006. Attempts were made to hide the magnitude of the problem and artificial limits were set to the time that these unreasonable patients could spend on a trolley. There were sanctions for those hospitals that didn't get these patients out of the AE departments quickly enough. That there was nowhere for such patients to go wasn't the Minister's problem. The ostrich tactic was decreed again "heads in the sand lads, some other disaster will turn up and they'll all forget about the trolleys". It was a tried and tested tactic in the good times when folk were easily distracted. It won't be any longer, when hurt and confused people are going to demand an account of a stewardship that has seriously let them down and now behaves as if none of the problems that beset us were remotely its fault.
The HA and myself set off on our mandatory three-mile walk in such hard conditions the other day and included a diversion to feed the swans and ducks in Blackrock Park. My mother used to take me there in my pram and we took our youngsters. The wheel has turned full circle; scary, isn't it?
Time was when we would have strode confidently along the icy paths, now we crept slowly along looking for the thawed bits and keeping close to the wall. The pond was frozen and so was the adjacent pathway.
As we approached, an elegant cob swan detached from the group and came to accept our largesse. He slipped and fell heavily on his tail. He was not pleased and made his displeasure known. I endeavoured to reassure him and told him that Minister Gormley was shortly cycling to Poland to get global warming back on track, or something like that. He was not convinced. "Bloody nonsense" said the ruffled swan. "Bloody nonsense" I agreed as I crept carefully away, mindful of the ice.
• Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon