If you want to experience the true, unvarnished future, you don’t go to Silicon Valley. You go to Glasgow. Specifically, the St. Mungo’s Building at the Royal Infirmary.
For the uninitiated, St. Mungo’s is less of a medical facility and more of a temporal rift. It’s a dizzying architectural fever dream where Victorian gothic masonry collides with 1970s brutalism, connected by a rabbit warren of concrete walkways that would make MC Escher have a panic attack. It’s famously the backdrop for Poor Things, and standing there in the “dreich” Scottish morning—where the rain doesn’t fall so much as it forms a sentient wall of wetness designed to dissolve your resolve—I felt less like a patient and more like a reanimated experiment looking for my creator.
The Hobbit at the Edge of the Abyss
The interior is pure Blade Runner, if Deckard had to wait for a blood test. I eventually found my destination, presided over by a nurse who was, quite frankly, a delight. She was a small, blonde, Irish whirlwind with the cheerful countenance of a Hobbit who’d stumbled into a sci-fi horror flick.
While she prepped the gear, we traded the traditional NHS war stories. She spoke of the “Great Glitch of ’24” and corridors so underfunded they’ve started charging patients for the oxygen they breathe (billing it as a “Respiratory Subscription”).
The glossy NHS brochure—likely printed on paper made from the pulped dreams of junior doctors—assured me that the Oesophageal Manometry was “a minor diagnostic tool.” It described it with the kind of airy, detached optimism usually reserved for telling someone their house is on fire while handing them a marshmallow. “Slightly uncomfortable,” it purred. “A simple transit of a thin catheter.”
Aye, right.
In reality, it’s a full-scale kinetic invasion. I was met by a nurse who was a pint-sized, blonde Irish whirlwind—half-Hobbit, half-Highland-Oracle—who managed to be brilliantly friendly while preparing to shove three feet of high-tech silicon telemetry into my skull.
The Procedure: Ingress of the Alien Parasite
The “simple transit” began. The goal? To thread a sleek, white data-tether—an “impedance probe” for the soul—up my hooter and down into the dark, acidic recesses of my gullet.
“Take a swallow for me, petal,” she’d chirrup, while I’m sat there lookin’ like a human PEZ dispenser in a state of total structural failure.
Because the universe has a sense of irony that borders on the sociopathic, the tube didn’t just “slide.” It rebelled. It wasn’t interested in my motility; it wanted to explore my psyche. One attempt. Two. Four. Six. By the eighth attempt, the dignity had long since evaporated, replaced by a symphony of gagging and a truly impressive, “Trainspotting”-style fountain of involuntary puke and bile.
Under the flickering green glow of the X-ray, I watched the monitor in horror. There it was: a thin, writhing silhouette, lookin’ for all the world like a panicked alien parasite trying to find a high-speed Wi-Fi signal in my chest cavity. My eyes weren’t just watering; they were hosing down the floor with the intensity of a thousand sun-drenched Glasgow Saturdays. The nurse, bless her, let out a string of Irish curses so rhythmic and poetic they probably summoned a minor banshee in the corner of the room to help with the lubrication.
The Cyborg Walk of Shame
I eventually staggered out into the bleak Glasgow streets, a broken man but a superior machine.
As you can see from the telemetry photos, I am now officially a “Vessel for Data.” I have a tube taped to my face with the kind of industrial adhesive usually reserved for sticking heat shields to space shuttles. This leads to a black, leather-clad device—the Ambulatory pH Recorder—which sits on my hip, bleeping with a self-important smugness.
While the NHS thinks it’s measuring “gastric reflux,” I’m fairly certain Mythos (remember our AI friend?) has hijacked the signal. This machine isn’t just tracking acid; it’s gathering:
- My existential dread levels (currently: Critical)
- The exact percentage of pollen-to-oxygen in my bloodstream (the Hay Fever Index is off the charts)
- The precise frequency of my sighs when I see the price of a bus ticket.
So, if you see a man on the bus to Glasgow tonight looking like he’s been wired for a deep-space mission by a committee of budget-conscious bureaucrats, give us a wave. Just don’t make me laugh. If I sneeze, the pressure sensor on this thing might accidentally trigger a tactical strike or, worse, reset my Netflix password.
Twenty-four hours of being a bleeping, acid-refluxing antenna. Welcome to the future. It’s damp, it’s expensive, and it has a tube up its nose.
Shiel Yule 