Days of Lines and Noses

I've never been on the waiting list for an operation before. It’s a curiously discombobulating experience, mainly because I have no idea when the surgery will actually be scheduled, and that’s a massive known unknown. While I'm familiar with the long periods of nothingness between my GP referring me to the hospital for a consultation, and receiving the letter that confirms my appointment, that’s a slightly different kettle of fish. I've been to four such consultations in the last few years, but each one has lasted an hour at most. None of them have involved a two week physical convalescence. I think that’s what I'm most concerned about.

My letter confirming I was on the waiting list stated that I am ‘guaranteed to be admitted for treatment within 12 weeks.’ The 12^th of January 2016 is the latest date I should expect the operation to be carried out. That’s almost as much as I know. Ideally, they would schedule me in between the 6^th and the 12^th January – otherwise, I'm a little concerned that my festive period would be disrupted. I have a few nights out, a friend’s birthday do/Star Wars showing, and 2 weeks’ annual leave planned at Christmas; I would be a little disappointed if I missed out on any of that, even if it were for the long-term good of my health. So, I've been trying to find out more about what's likely to happen, partly due to my increased research dependency.

When I was studying Standard Grade Art at secondary school, the teacher emphasised the importance of research when preparing to start work on a drawing or painting. I wasn't particularly receptive of this wisdom when I was 14 – surely I knew what an apple looked like? However, over the intervening 20 years, I've come to value the importance of research, through my studies and my professional career. Today, in my job, I have to be able to put contracts in place for various, disparate commodities, and quite often the subject matter can be things I've had no real prior knowledge of. Learning about the product, or the service, rapidly, is key.

I like to write fiction in my spare time, with the semi-serious aim of one day being a published novelist. Again, as I've grown older, I've found that the time I spend researching my stories outstrips the time I spend actually writing (of course, some of this ‘research’ is diversion; like good writers, I procrastinate a lot.) I find that I have to completely understand all facets of the story I'm trying to tell, lest it appear inauthentic. This is probably a reaction to 30 years of being exposed to popular culture that is riddled with plot holes and factual errors, and dedicating several person hours to reading TVTropes.org from cover to cover.

If you’re not familiar with TV Tropes, it’s a fantastic wiki-style site where users (or Tropers) catalogue the various conventions, crutches and plot devices (tropes) that fiction writers often use when creating films, TV shows, etc. One of the Super Tropes documented on the site is ‘Reality is Unrealistic’, which collects a series of tropes that describe the disconnect between what culture portrays as ‘reality’, and what reality actually is. These tropes cover situations that arise when the viewer or reader thinks a situation described in fiction lacks verisimilitude, but which is actually firmly based in actual science or real life events. A very quick example might be that Brigadoon wasn't filmed in Scotland, because the location scout allegedly couldn't find anywhere that looked Scottish enough. Take a look at the trope page; there are many more examples.

Clearly for writers, there’s a danger that no matter how much or how little research they do, there’s a danger that the end product of their endeavours comes across as realistic, or unrealistic, depending on cosseted by TV and film their audience is. While I await my letter inviting me to have the inside of my nose hit with a hammer (I'm assuming that’s what they’ll do, I haven’t looked into the actual procedure too closely,) I've been trying to find out what I should expect to happen, as a patient.

The NHS being is a large UK-wide bureaucracy, but there are devolved elements in all four constituent countries. Each country’s service is then further broken down into regional trusts, and some (but not all) of these trusts have issued their own guidance on septoplasties. Apart from the trust carrying out my operation. There are a number of minor differences in each guidance, mostly relating to things like the time spent in hospital post-op (a few hours to overnight) to the recovery period (one week to two weeks.) However, I suppose every patient and case is different, and requires different treatment. At this stage, therefore, I still don’t quite know what to expect. My research has uncovered a fair amount of variables.

I'm taking part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again this month, a contest of sorts where you challenge yourself to write a 50,000 word in 30 consecutive calendar days.  As alluded to earlier, I find myself being drawn towards more and more research, fastidiously working out the logistics that underpin the characters’ existence. But sometimes I worry that I'm doing too much research, and that it’s stifling my creativity. My experience of reading up about my septoplasty suggests that my experience of the procedure might be very different to someone that had their op in Ayrshire, or Devonshire. They might find my account of my surgery less realistic, because there are things that our respective NHS boards and specialists did differently, or our physicalities are not quite the same.

Hopefully, this will inspire me to be less anal about the levels of research I'm doing. The great thing about novels is that they capture a world that doesn't exist. They’re escapist and fantastical, and I'm not entirely sure readers would mind if I made up the location of a motel in the Florida Keys that my protagonist spends a night in, instead of spending time in Google Earth trying to find one that actually exists. I think verisimilitude is important, but I'm worried that I've become a slave to realism. Back to the Future is one of my favourite films, a ridiculously tightly-plotted tale with some of the finest mise-en-scene in cinema. Yes, Robert Zemeckis and Robert Gale did pain-staking research for all three films in the trilogy, but the central premise still involves travelling through time in a DeLorean. Great fiction doesn't have to be realistic.