James's great adventure in Europe!...but without crossing the Channel yet.

4:30 in the morning on the 21st of April and I am walking in the door of my room. I will, in a moment, fall into a sleep so deep it would probably be confused for a coma. I have just finished flying, hiking, training, bussing, walking, driving, stumbling and boating my way around continental Europe. I have gone through 4 languages, 3 boxes of antibiotics, 2 passports and 1 computer. This is where my story ends. This is also where my story begins. And, as is appropriate for the beginning of any story, this is where we will start.
4:30 in the morning on the 3rd of April and I am walking out the door of my room. Lugging my self and my backpack, loaded with enough crap to last me (I hope) a couple of weeks, I mentally prepare to step into the cold, rainy night. My bus to the airport will be departing in six hours, but I need to go to the A&E (the British equivalent of the ER, not related to the grocery store chain). For those of you who are unaware, I had been developing a pilonidal cyst in the few weeks leading up to my trip. It’s a problem I ran in to a year ago, so I was pretty sure what I was dealing with. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help whatsoever. I am unable to sit, lay down or walk for more than a few minutes without being in excruciating pain so the idea of a flight to Rome, followed by two weeks of buses, trains, planes and ferries is more than unappealing. I know that even if I somehow managed to make it to Rome I would immediately have to go to the hospital. There’s just no way I would be anything close to a functional human being. I would probably ruin my aunt, uncle and cousins’ vacation in Rome and end up in the emergency room somewhere where people didn’t speak English or give a shit about me. You may hate on the NHS all you want, but I now have a stunning amount of experience with the British health system and they are more than sympathetic despite the fact that I pay no taxes and me and my countryfolk unashamedly abuse their system to get free medical treatment and prescriptions. So I say, “fuck it, James, go get this taken care of so you can enjoy yourself.” Half an hour later I walk into the A&E and register with the nurses (I’ve been to the hospital so many times, usually between 1 and 3 a.m. that I’ve begun recognizing the bums who spend their nights in the hospital waiting room). Luckily there’s only one other person in need of medical attention, some emo kid who walked down the wrong dark alley and was now tearfully sniffling through a nose pointing in the wrong direction. Ha. So after some time (I don’t know how, but regardless of whether there’s 50 patients or 2 in the waiting room it ALWAYS takes one-and-a-half to two hours before you get seen. Bizarre.) I get checked out by a nurse. I tell her I have a pilonidal cyst that needs to be lanced and go off on a 5 minute story I’d prepared about my brother being married in Rome in 2 days and how I couldn’t sit but desperately needed to get there (I chose this story because I thought if I told them I would be flying in a few hours they would refuse to do the surgery and make me stay, but it would elicit just enough sympathy for them to perform the operation). She nods sympathetically then proceeds to take my temperature, my blood pressure, asks me my height and weight and then tells me to go back outside. Intense screening process. Eventually I get to see a doctor, but at this point I’m getting nervous. My bus is leaving not too far from now and I still have to have somebody slice my back (lower, upper, lower back) with a scalpel and squeeze out some blood and pus. Yum. I retell my tale about my brother’s impending marriage and I see that this doctor is actually a bit of a softie. It’s not something I normally do but I’m desperate so I try to turn on the big, wet Bambi eyes. He says it’s not a procedure they usually do at the A&E. I insist. He says they’re really not allowed to and they should defer me to a general practitioner. I insist. He tells me that the procedure would be painful and very temporary. I insist. He cuts me open. I imagine nobody’s ever been too happy to have a doctor digging around their rear end with a series of bloody instruments, but I couldn’t be more thrilled (despite being stuffed with so much gauze I feel like a Thanksgiving turkey). I make my bus with time to spare, am now comfortable sitting down and have everything I need for an awesome couple weeks of traveling.
This trips gonna be great. Goodbye England!