When I woke up in the hospital, it was quite appalling. It was my first, and thus far, only operation. An open myomectomy. For those who don’t know (and I’ll avoid the grizzly details), sometimes women grow fibroids. Fibroids are little fatty cysts which grow in and around the uterus. Please God, don’t be having your dinner reading this.

Anyway, most fibroids don’t become problematic unless they grow or accumulate some friends, and most fibroids stay somewhere between the size of a grape and a golf ball. Mine was the size of a baby’s head. It was giving me a bad back, broken sleep, and it made me very grumpy. I was not a good person to be around.

So, the fibroid had to go. The procedure can almost be explained as a caesarean, but with no baby. When I came to, I knew where I was, I knew what I’d had done. I couldn’t work out why I wasn’t in the Army, and I didn’t know where my penis had gone.

(Lifelong lesbian here. Never had a penis. Never felt the need. Really missed it in my drugged up stupor, though)

If the anaesthetic hadn’t made me so groggy, vomity and generally confused, it would have been quite fun. One positive to be drawn, which I would have had no personal knowledge of before, is this: if you’re on a hospital-worth of drugs, you can tell anyone to go and do things to themselves. No one minds. They put it all down to the drugs. I called my surgeon a prick, and offered to rewire the operating theatre because it was ugly.

One thing I’m glad I have now, which would have been a lifesaver then, is this blog. I was so bored in the hospital. True, a lot of what I would have blogged about would have been total tosh, but it might have been entertaining total tosh.

‘Sex, Death & Scallops’ is out tomorrow, by the way. No fibroids, just – well – sex, death and scallops. There are other things in life, but I like to think I focus on the important elements.