I think I told you that I've gone deaf in my right ear. My GP couldn't do anything, so made me a hospital appointment for this morning. It was all a bit of a nightmare really. I was ten minutes late anyway, and then I took a wrong turning in the car park and found myself stuck down a narrow dead-end. In trying to turn round I got the front of the car wedged over a block of concrete by the side of the road, and couldn't go forwards or backwards. After a lot of revving the engine and getting out and kicking at the block I finally managed to get out, though it can't have done the car any good. So I went and parked, only to find that I didn't have any money for a ticket. So I drove out of the hospital and parked in the street, walked back to the hospital, finally found the outpatients department, only to find I was at the wrong hospital.

When I finally turned up in the right place I was forty minutes late, and got a nasty look from the receptionist. Mr Frootko, the ear, nose and throat man, held a tuning fork against various bits of my head and asked if I could hear it. I heard it every time, so he sent me off to have some more tests. A woman put headphones on me and played beeps through both ears and I had to press a button when I heard them. When she'd finished she sent me back to Mr Frootko with the graph she'd drawn. He gave one look at it and said: "My god, you have got a problem! I thought you were making it up!" I'm now booked in for an MRI scan, which isn't in my dictionary but I seem to remember it stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging or something. In any case, I had to make the appointment in the X-ray Department, so it's obviously some kind of x-ray.

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