I HAVE a new theory about life. It is generally bad news if you can accurately describe one or more medical conditions in a way the man or woman in the street can understand – because the chances are you’ll be suffering from them.

This fundamental truth has been revealed to me because I seem to have spent more time on hospital wards or in consulting rooms for various injuries or ailments in the last couple of years than the previous 20 put together.

Until fairly recently, I wasn’t a major burden on the NHS. I hadn't been to my GP surgery, except for travel injections, for ten years, and I hadn’t had an overnight stay in hospital for more than 30 years.

But in the last two years things have gone haywire. I won't list everything, but the result is I can explain what happens when you rupture your Achilles tendon, the possible treatments and approximately how long they take (quite a long time, and lots of hopping about on crutches, for your information); and I know more about the practicalities of examining the stomach with an endoscope than I really want to.

The latest additions to my treasure chest of medical knowledge are even more complex. I now know why it is that baby teeth come out so easily. It’s because of a natural process whereby their roots are eaten away when the top of the emerging adult teeth push against them from below. Fascinating, eh? Trouble is, I have a couple of seriously wrongly positioned teeth, one of which is pushing into the root of another adult tooth and probably causing it to be eaten away and causing intermittent sharp pains in the further recesses of my jaw. Sorting that out will probably need another trip to the hospital. Pass the painkillers.

I already have the aforementioned pills, because of a very nasty pain that started in my right side and then spread across much of my chest and abdomen. This started to hit me during the back end of last year, and returned in the early hours of last Monday. As a result of that, I know all about how gallstones are formed in the gall bladder, and how they sometimes get pushed out, along a bodily tube that just isn’t big enough, hence the pain. How to sort it? Another trip to the hospital to whip out the gall bladder seems the favoured option. Maybe they could do both jobs at the same time?

One of the galling (geddit?) things about this is that I spent many years reporting on health issues, including a spell as the health reporter of this newspaper. One of the things I wrestled with was trying to explain issues accurately, and in a way most people could understand. That applied to the way the NHS is run, but every time I got a handle on that the Government changed the system, so it was back to square one.

But what was more difficult was getting the doctors to explain things in layman’s terms. I explained every time that they needed to spell things out. But they would just nod, then come up with something so complicated and technical it would be all right for The Lancet, but completely bamboozled me who actually knew a tiny bit about the subject so heaven knows what it did for most readers.

Yet these same health professionals are clearly perfectly capable of explaining things straightforwardly, or else how would I know all about gallstones, gastritis and how baby teeth lose their roots? It’s very inconsiderate of them, because having to actually experience these things to be able to describe them is asking a bit much, even of the most dedicated journalist.

In the meantime, don’t ask me how I am unless you’ve got a lot of time to spare.