biopolitics and a cup of tea with biscuits

I am in a chair, leaning back slightly, my bare legs in the medical stirrups, I am strapped into the stirrups with burgandy coloured restraints. I am wearing a black long sleeved tee shirt and green and red stripped socks.

Medical procedures are always existential crises, they never quite catch me unawares, in this case the stress began a week ago after I agreed the date and time, Tuesday afternoon at 1.30, the hospital is slightly run-down, urging us to come inside, to inhabit the outpatients department for an hour or two, or even to wait out the apocalypse. And yet the hospital is simply the place where we go for medical procedures to ascertain the state of the cancer, its a transperineal prostate biopsy/ies — under transrectal ultrasound guidance… . Later I will sit opposite the nurses waiting for the next patients to arrive drinking tea and eating ginger biscuits. Others may find medical procedures welcome, a familiar thing, liberatory as they love the plastic surgery, enjoy changing their sex or simply feel reassured that somebody cares about them, me i have built wall around myself to protect myself from others, others penetrating the skin of my body… The doctor cleans me, I don’t know what this means, he inserts the ultrasound then “the injection of local anaesthetic will hurt slightly” he injects local anesthetic into the prostate. What is your work? I am retired these days. What did you do? the nurse to my left asked. A sharp pain as the local anestheaestthetic…is injected where the needles will be inserted to extract the samples on the left…(the needle about 6 inches long) he takes the samples… Relax your bottom the Doctor says… we talk about workUsed to do, software engineering, systems analysis and philosophy, only the philosophy is real to me now. Is someone with you? Yes my wife I say. What does she do? She is a psychoanalyst, she doesn’t take on new clients anymore. A psychoanalyst the Doctor says. Yes, half Freudian, half Jungian, she works relationally. In my stress and trying to force my body not to too rigid I cannot be clear. Easier to talk about the Korean drama ‘Call it Love’ that I am watching. Some people like surgery, medical practice, apart from out patients procedures like this, I have been in hospital exactly twice… both times are terrible memories, physical-medical events that have created existential crises, memories I cannot forget. How can people desire these types of events. How could Cherise want to go through all the surgery so that she could wear her beloved Jaeger suits? I never knew where her body was reconstructed. She was a fascist before and after, I quite liked her. Here though he, the Doctor injects more anaesthetic before taking more samples from the other side. six samples or more from this side… I lost count, I could not count. They did not ask me about what kind of philosophy, what kind of systems. What the K-drama was. Words and the communication have no meaning, they are noise, pure noise, the actual meaning is contained in the order-words the Doctor and Nurses say, which enable the biopsy to take place. phsst, pfsst, the indescribable noise of the long needles extracting samples. The words and the communication make the event bearable, the biopsy extracted and placed in the sample jars, are the only read meaning, a pure instance of Serres version information-theory model. The noise of the speech making the collection of information, the extraction bearable. The samples are destined for histology where they will be analysed and the results typed up with the recorded evidence sent to the meeting which will then… to … He tapes, was it the nurse or the doctor? some bandage over the bleeding needle holes. They don’t give me any antibiotics.. The probabilty of infection is low, contact your GP or go to A&E if its… I put the folded instruction sheets, which as I type this, my anxiety and stress fading, I see his name is on the sheet. I have written the details of the telephone appointment, the 26th he said. It may be later. That telephone meeting will tell me what happens next on the basis of the report from histology, something or nothing. The next patient enters the office as I finish my tea, eat my ginger biscuits, pee blood in the hospital toilet and she drives me home in my car… I am leaking. My car growls in sympathy with me, a machine, an event. Afterwards I hurt not simply from the procedure though I can feel the anaesthetic wearing off, no no no, it’s from the relief I feel that it’s over, no I hurt because of the stress on my muscles from my fingers, arms, neck to my toes my body aches. My pants and trouser streaked with small amounts of blood and i suppose urine and mucus, shrugs. Bodies are wet. One of my teachers long ago spoke of bodies as machines, he was deeply neurotic and loved medical procedures, lectured well I’m sure I misremember on Foucault and … Eventually I go to bed, reading some pages of Bora Chung, about a wife making suspicious phone calls. Later during the night, in the dark, only a few photons entering the dark house, the rest being from LEDs that are in other rooms, it’s all greyness and black, I pee blood and urine, a mix of blood, mucus and shit leaves my body through my bruised anus. In the morning I feel better, feeling as if I’ve survived again. Perhaps on the 26th I’ll have to panic again as they tell me about operations, drugs, chemotherapy, machines cutting… They are wrong to say we can get used to anything. Your entire life has been an exercise in autonomy and being left alone, hence your reaction to being medicalized, just like when you worked… She puts a plate in front of me — This is designed for maximal nutritional value, she says at lunchtime — laughing at me but relaxed… The needles pushed deeply into my body, the red flesh and blood dropped into the sample jars. I’ll do F again… hold onto the wand, the Doctor says to the nurse as he… It was once easier to say what writers were writing about. So many genres have simply ended, the write can write about anything, the existential and sociological themes that make people imagine thatwe have a choice, when that choice has already been gambled away…