I Knew the Nurse's Next Words

It was a routine referral — a lump in my right wrist, almost certainly a ganglion, the GP said, and it was. This is not that kind of medical story. It is about the eleven words I heard twice.

The clinic was new to me: new town, new building, one of those bright modular units that smell of vinyl. Sitting in the corridor, the deja vu arrived slowly, like water finding a level. The corkboard with the crooked flu poster: known. The particular squeak-squeak-silence of a wheeled trolley somewhere: known, including the silence.

And then, the way you remember a line from a film, I remembered a nurse leaning out of the second door and saying: 'The doctor will want the left one scanned too, while you're here.' Eleven words, her intonation dipping on 'too'. The memory came with the smell of vinyl attached.

Ten minutes later the second door opened. The nurse leaned out. 'The doctor will want the left one scanned too, while you're here.' Dip on 'too'. I stood up with my ears ringing.

Here is where it stops being a parlour trick. The scan of the right wrist confirmed the boring ganglion. The left wrist — which had nothing wrong with it, no lump, no pain, scanned purely because I was already on the table and, when the technician hesitated, because I insisted, citing the nurse — showed a small mass that was not a ganglion. The kind you want found early. It was found early. I had surgery within a month and I am fine, with a scar the length of a grain of rice.

Afterwards I asked the nurse why she had said 'the left one too' before any scan of the right existed. She checked her notes, frowned, and could not find a reason. 'Sometimes you just say things,' she said.

Sometimes you just hear them first, apparently. I have stopped needing an explanation. I keep the discharge letter as one.