John Arnold: I’m sat in a hospital bed... I had not eaten rhubarb in 50 years!

On Monday, I ate rhubarb in a most unusual setting. You see, I don’t think I’ve eaten that particular delicacy in 50 years!

We always grew rhubarb at home, above between the apple trees in the garden. For some reason unknown to me, the rhubarb plant is called a ‘stool’, which must not be confused in any way with the end-product of a personal human digestion procedure!

Once planted, the rhubarb stool will last for years, even decades, and like a variety of cabbage named ‘cut and come’, it’s the same with the stalks of rhubarb - the more it’s cut or pulled, the more it grows.

Now, it wasn’t the fact that copious amounts of horse manure were piled on the rhubarb patch every spring that turned me against eating it. Mam was a dinger at making and baking rhubarb tarts and pies as well as apple tarts from our own Sheep Snout apples. What put me off eating rhubarb was the acid in it.

I know that many fruits contain citric acid - oranges especially - but I always got that acidy taste and ‘feeling’ on my tongue and teeth, all over my mouth in fact.

As a child, then, I gave up eating any cake, tart, pie, jam or jelly that contained rhubarb and to be honest, it never bothered me in the slightest. We still often have rhubarb tarts at home, but I happily abstain.

Getting back to my indulgence on Monday last, well, I suppose it really started on Saturday.

Many of the younger generation will be blissfully unaware of how bacon comes to be on a dinner plate, or the DNA of sausages and rashers. No-one worries either about the origin of our national dish of bacon and cabbage.

To produce bacon, the primary ingredient has to be taken to a place of despatch where it undergoes substantial alteration. Long ago, the resultant meat pieces were placed in a barrel of brine - a mixture of water, salt and saltpetre - and ‘twas said after a few weeks the bacon was ‘cured’.

We used keep it in the barrel until the night before cooking. Left overnight steeping in cold water to draw off excess salt, the water would then be changed in the boiling process.

Nowadays bacon-makers produce mild-cured bacon for us from our home-fed ‘bacon ingredients’ (fat pigs).

So, last Saturday, with a driving neighbour whose animal has enjoyed Airbnb facilities on our farm for a year, we went to a county nearby that has won far too many hurling All-Irelands in recent years!

I was standing at the counter of a busy butcher’s shop. Six or seven customers were around talking, and you know the way one word leads to another? Talking of old times and old timers we were when I told them that ‘Today is my birthday’ - and it was, and asked all present - all strangers to me - to guess what age I was.

I pirouetted around the shop floor in my wellies, overcoat and furry hat. Seven guessed different ages from 77 to 91. I was a bit shook-looking and fairly shaken after that judgement!

Luckily, I had my EU Medical Card to prove I was nearly a decade less than their lowest guess.

I missed Mass on Sunday ’cause the asthma played up again - in truth, I should have known on Friday or Saturday. I have it with years, but with inhalers and tablets it’s usually OK. Every now and then, I tend to get bad chest infections which need medical interventions and a course of what I call the ‘steer-eyes’, tiny little red yokes like baby Smarties.

Hindsight is great sight, they say, and last weekend I should have sought help earlier. Sunday morning, after the jobs were done in the yard, I was gasping for breath. After seeing an ‘emergency’ doctor, I was hospital bound to Cork and in the Mercy A&E shortly after 11am.

We often hear criticism of our health system but I couldn’t over- praise the assistance I got. Soon, I was on treatment and wired up and tubed up for medication.

Lying alone there on the trolley, a sketch of the d’Unbelievables - the Pat Shortt and the late Jon Kenny came to mind. The lads are down in the crowd; Jon says (quietly) to Pat, ‘Is that Bridie there? She was in for three weeks, only home a week - God, she’s very shook looking, she must have lost three stone, woeful’.

Pat says, ‘Well, Bridie, you’re looking great, mighty altogether, you’re after getting strong too’.

‘Dats right,’ says Jon, ‘I’d say you put on a stone and I heard you were on the dripping for a few days, sure, you’re grand, the dripping is great - straight into the vein it goes.’

Well, I was put on the drip(ping) too, and nebuliser and oxygen, and things improved a little in a matter of hours. When I went in, my chest sounded like a concertina being played badly, but soon the music stopped!

I was not very comfortable on the trolley and had no sleep, then the doctors were in and out with hundreds of questions- all needed.

I being in hospital 40 or more years ago. In the middle of the night, a very old man came in by ambulance. He wasn’t too bad but had forgotten his hearing aids! The doctor said, ‘Tell me about your stools’ - he didn’t hear so she repeated, louder this time ‘Your stools -are they hard or soft?’

‘Oh’, says he, ‘they are hard, very hard, my grandfather made ’em from oak with three legs each!’

About 2am, I was transferred to a two-bedded room and a grand bed - more questions to be answered, but I slept a bit with the help of the cool oxygen.

I woke at 6am before the nurses changed rosters, and every one of them, well, all I’d say is that Florence Nightingale would be very, very proud of them all.

As I ate my toast, I could hear a tap, tap, tap from behind the curtain where my room-mate Paul was breakfasting. It was the unmistakeable sound of an egg being decapitated - he had ordered two boiled eggs.

About 60 years ago, I was an altar boy answering a Station Mass in a house in the townland of Knockeen. Fr James Corbett, the Parish Priest, a saintly man, was saying the Mass. As was the normal practise, the altar boy or boys ate their breakfast with the priest and I was seated next to Fr Corbett. A boiled egg and toast were his staple requirements so I got the same.

Normally, at home, when boiled eggs were on the menu, they’d be boiled for about five minutes - not hard-boiled but not soft. I didn’t know that Fr Corbett’s ‘specification’ was a maximum of two minutes, in and out.

Well, when I did my tap, tap, tap, oh Lord, save us, the white and the yolk ran down the side of the egg into the little plate under the egg-cup. I was nearly sick as my tummy turned cartwheels. I couldn’t touch it, but Fr. Corbett turned to me and said: “John, eat your egg, it’s bad manners to leave food after you.”

Well, back then the power of the Church was unquestionable and I obeyed the clerical order. With my eyes closed, I sucked and ate that three-quarters raw egg. I think that was either 1964 or 1965 and never, ever since that morning have I consumed a boiled egg.

Furthermore, even looking at such a disgusting culinary spectacle still upsets my none-too-delicate stomach. Horses for courses, and each to his own, as they say.

Then, about 11am in the Mercy, I was offered biscuits or a yogurt. Hungry I was, so I had the creamy yogurt - I never looked at the container. What was it, only rhubarb!

I ate the last morsel and ’twas grand. After all these years eating rhubarb - maybe a boiled egg next!

I suppose nobody wants to be in hospital, but it puts down a marker. I had plans for every single night this week. I suppose, though I’m neither 77 nor 91, every birthday makes me a little bit older.

The nurses and doctors and attendants that looked after me truly have a vocation of mercy.