At the body scanner in a Romanian airport during the summer, I set off the alarm, but not in the usual way. There was nothing in my pockets and the security people, looking alarmed themselves, didn’t even pat me down to check.
Instead, I was made to go back through the machine again, then the neighbouring one, with the same result. After that, they asked me to stand aside and wait for the man who dealt with situations such as this.
My first-ever strip search appeared to be imminent. But when the man arrived, he just asked in broken English if I’d “attended a procedure” recently. I nearly said no – that I’d attended a literary conference, on Flann O’Brien. Then the penny dropped. He meant a medical procedure.
“Yes!” I remembered cheerfully, delighted to have found the correct answer: “I was treated for cancer – prostate cancer – a couple of months ago. Is that what set the alarm off?”
The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926
The spirit of 1965 – Kevin Rafter on Ireland’s first television election
Grief and remembrance – Ronan McGreevy on Dublin’s Armistice Day in 1924
The Night Mayor – Oliver O’Hanlon on Jimmy Walker, New York’s colourful political kingpin
Here was something clearly not about a bicycle, to reference Flann. Even so, it had an element of The Third Policeman, because it was about molecular interchange.
The cancer had been caught early and in a mild form, so they were able to treat it with a thing called brachytherapy.
This involves injecting small, weakly radioactive seeds into the prostate via the perineum (a part of the body intimately connected with bicycle saddles), whereupon the decaying material kills any bad cells while not harming good ones.
I’d been through several airport checks since, including one on the way to Romania, uneventfully. But either this machine was more sensitive than others or I had just hit peak radioactivity.
Either way, my interrogator wanted to see a letter from the doctors, which I didn’t have. Nor could I find a relevant email in my phone.
So, bringing me into an office where he had a list on the wall, he asked if I knew which “isotope” had been used. Whereupon, pleased with myself again, I announced confidently that it was “Ruthenium-106″.
It wasn’t. I must have seen that when first googling “brachytherapy” and the name was impressive enough to stick. As I have since been reminded, my treatment involved “Iodine-125″, which sounds disappointingly prosaic by comparison, like a dietary supplement for cattle.
In the meantime, the airport man could not find ruthenium on his list, or anything else that rang a bell with me (as opposed to with the body scanner). So in the end, he just waved me through. I was clearly harmless, and possibly gormless as well.
The episode reminded me that as a teenager back during the Cold War, I used to deputise for my county councillor father at seminars in which community leaders were trained to deal with the nuclear winter that was bound to descend on us sooner or later, when the Russians bombed Sellafield or it melted down spontaneously.
I could hardly have imagined then a future in which I myself would one day be the source of a small nuclear incident in Eastern Europe. But then again, as recently as last year, I would have struggled to imagine myself in a hospital bed.
The day I got the diagnosis, as usual, my most pressing problem in life was how the fill the next day’s Irishman’s Diary. I had a 12pm appointment – awkward for a mid-afternoon deadline – and the blank-page-dread was rising.
Of course, if the doctor had told me I had only a week to live, I would have taken the day off. But his news was somewhat less dramatic than that, while also falling short of the threshold for the next question I always ask in times of crisis: “Could I get a column out of this?”
Minimally invasive as the eventual procedure was, it did involve my first overnight hospital stay, not counting the vigils kept during my parents’ last illnesses.
I still had a concept of hospital frozen in the mid-1990s when my father, a farmer who didn’t have health insurance, was usually in a room with at least one other patient, if not several.
So when I checked in the evening before the thing, I had packed ear plugs to block out the inevitable snoring of the guy next to me, or the terrible soap opera on the communal TV.
I also had a nightgown and slippers (both newly bought in Dunne’s) for treks down the corridor to wherever the bathroom was.
Despite paying VHI for 30 years, I had somehow not expected to be in a private room, with my own TV and ensuite. When a man came round to take orders for next day’s lunch and dinner, I thought for a moment it was just his Dublin sense of humour.
Apart from some guilt, my experience was so comfortable I would have happily stayed a week. I walked home 24 hours after the procedure, pain-free. But I was still a little shaken by the diagnosis, decades overdue, that I was now middle-class.