While you are reading this I'll be packing my bag for a little hospital visit. At least, that's what I'll be doing if you are a traditional reader of the hard copy of this newspaper and you're working your way through times2 over breakfast on Tuesday. If you're reading it on your way home on the train, or after dinner (haven't you got something better to do?) I'll already be in the hospital and it will be too late to wish me luck.

Or perhaps you are reading this on the web, some days, weeks, months, even years later and it will all be over. You could call up next week's column straight away to find out what happened. If you can't find the column it could mean one of two things. Either the search engine isn't functioning very well or I'm not.

But this is a silly digression which might suggest I was trying to avoid addressing the reality of my situation. So, apologies for that and let me return to the subject in hand as if you are all eating your Tuesday breakfast.

No need to take extra care lifting that piece of toast. This bulletin is not a marmalade- dropper (although if you are in the condition I will be in come Wednesday afternoon, you are clearly in no position to bend down and scoop chunks of Seville orange off the floor).

A hernia repair. That is all. A commonplace, routine operation. Really nothing to worry about and, as you can tell, I'm not. Hardly given the matter a thought. Indeed if I hadn't had to write this I probably wouldn't have recalled the fact that I was going into hospital until it was time for you to start spreading your marmalade and me to pack my bag. I have barely wasted a moment on the prospect of being knocked out with a general anaesthetic while the surgeon cuts me open with a great big knife and then fiddles about with my intestines. Me? I didn't bat an eyelid at the talk of discomfort; of being unable to get off the sofa for a week or two; of the small, but real, possibility of something going wrong. A possibility so small that the surgeon asked if I had completed my family.

Nor have I been lying in bed at night gazing up at the blackout blind, pondering for sleepless hour after hour the implications of being pumped full of somebody else's blood. Certainly not.

Readers with weirdly powerful memories (with the emphasis on the weird) might recall that I once gave an account here of my kidney stone traumas. As those readers cannot number more than two, namely my wife and my mother, and they retain only the haziest memories of the details, I'll recap: horrible reaction to kidney stone treatment, A&E, spectacular internal bleeding, completely black groin region, doctors astonished and fascinated in rather disconcerting way.

There was talk of a clotting problem but the tests didn't work and I thought little more of it. Yes, I know what any woman reading this is saying: “typical bloke. Medical problem and it's head-in-sand time.” But then 18 months on, the dear old NHS suddenly, somehow remembered me, or found me on a lost list. More tests and it turns out I have a platelet abnormality. For 38 years I have functioned fine. Prick me and I bleed, but we're not talking unstoppable, gushing geysers. But, apparently, I don't clot properly in a way they don't fully understand. So before the hernia op I get a transfusion of other people's platelets.

“Will it change you?” asked my wife, intrigued. There followed speculation as to what a dose of somebody else's blood might do. Perhaps, I'd emerge newly athletic, or with the dancing ability of a latter-day Travolta. “Will we able to tell immediately from the way you walk?” she said cheerfully. I pointed out that I would be virtually incapable of walking at all for a few days. “Some believe that Ronald Reagan was never the same after he was pumped full of somebody else's sterile blood,” I said. That might have had more to do with the accuracy of the would-be assassin's bullet than the blood transfusion, but I didn't get into that.

The blood will be fine. I know it will. But if you should detect signs in future columns that I have changed - such as starting to worry unnecesarily about medical matters in a pathetic way - do, please, let me know. That's if I'm capable of writing columns, of course.

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