Magic bullet

I can see why those poor desperate folks turn to snake oil peddlers, give me a few months and who knows I too will be chanting Urdu, under a magnetic pyramid while trying to balance a yogi blessed Himalayan kryptonite crystal on my on my head.

I have been hunting for the holy grail of treatments, a blue bubbling tonic in a glass vial, that will suddenly make everything normal again.

Bottom line I have two choices, well three if you include doing nothing which actually seem like a good idea as I have no symptoms, feels odd to effectively give a neurosurgeon a new Aston Martin so I can have a go at Russian roulette with the potential out come of the hammer hitting the handy orange Disable Parking bullet. If I leave it things will get more complicated, a stitch in time and all that.

So the two real options are Zap it with some Buzz Lightyear ray gun or make a big hole in my head and cut it out.

The local surgeon suggested he book me in to his clinic in two week time, stick a special Harold Robins like hat on and zap it for 20 minutes, then I can go home for a salad. Call me an old cynic, but like Gandhi once said if its too good to be true...

I did some more research and our "bit too laid back" Doc failed to mention the hat required a Black and Decker cordless drill and raw plugs, its screwed directly into your skull. The reason it has to be fixed, if I twitch during the Chernobyl like gamma ray firing there will be, as our American cousins say "collateral damage" which can range from slightly crisping the edge of a near by Arab kebab to totally vaporizing a Baghdad convent school for blind children.

It can take months if not years to see if it worked, as it is still flesh and part of me, it tends to expand, gets blistered and really upset when microwaved. This expansion may cause all sorts of complications as it twangs around all the nerves that pass through the tumour. So when your eyeball starts spinning like a jackpot machine and and you are on your knees barfing up from motion sickness, you really don't know if its because you are getting better or worse.

The icing on the cake, it could turn cancerous and if it still keeps growing then separating a now crispy, gnarled, scar covered and very pissed off tumour from hair like nerves will be a challenge of biblical proportions on a microscopic playing field.

If I went down this Dr. No route every time I forget my keys or drool a bit of Wheatabix in the morning it would be a full on Allah Akbar rush to the local ER to check if its just given birth to an even uglier offspring.

Option 2 cut it out, sounds easy enough, but your head is like a modern car, open the bonnet everything is covered and sealed, you would be hard pushed to find the dip stick let alone the spark plugs. Big yellow signs warning "Warranty Void if Opened" are there for a reason, its not designed to be messed with. If GAWD intended us to tweak around with our brains then a handy hatch would have been provided bit like the mouth for maintaining the teeth.

Once my bonce is open the neurosurgeon using microscopes has to try and scrape and cut away the tumour without cutting or bending any of the facial nerves, the surgery means the removal of the balance section of the inner ear, so when you first come out, for the next few days will be like setting up a bed on one of those spinning tea cup rides. Most end up with some form of facial paralysis, bit like that just left the dentist feeling, when you drink it all dribbles out the numb side. There are horror stories of having to stitch shut one eye, as you wont be able to feel when its drying out and turning into a raisin. Another odd one, you may not be able to walk in the dark, your body is now totally reliant on your eyesight to figure out if your are standing perpendicular to mother earth, if its dark you crumple into a heap on the floor. Lets not forget a common and life threatening problem of brain fluids leaking out of your nose and eyes months after.

The outcome of both options are so unpredictable. Here is my best analogy assuming you can get the best surgeons at the best hospitals, then you have the choice of a Mercedes, BMW, Lexus as opposed to Proton, Kia, Cherry.

Then there is the size of the tumor a small one means you get a concrete block about the size of an oil drum, medium size a block the size of a golf cart, and big, we are talking about a car like size lump of concrete.

Mine is medium, so lets stick this golf cart size lump of concrete at the end of a runway. I then have to get into the car of choice and drive at 50 mph straight into the block.

What I will be like after the dust and fires have settled is anyone's guess, some people just open whats left of the door and flick off the broken glass and plastic and walk away, others are crippled and some though only a few these days don't come out at all.

That is my bullet, a leather seated one with a Mark Levinson sound system. Heading down the runway, it has all the ABS, multi airbags, traction control, HUD, but the result of the impact? there is no magic with my bullet.