All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551
[ 9 minute read ]
Well, that was weird.
I had a doctor's appointment at 9pm last night.
'Come to the field behind the ruined church,' I had been told. 'And bring a live chicken!'
Well, it might just as well have been said that way.
I couldn't get an appointment for four weeks with any doctor in my local surgery, not even a telephone appointment. My knee hurts. Google had told me I have a sports injury to my knee. That was when I absolutely knew that I needed to see a doctor. I imagined a conversation with my doctor, 'Doctor, I have no memory of playing sports. I think I must be sleepwalking.' Sometimes, I think I do, sleepwalk, that is. People I don't know seem to know me. Perhaps I have met them before but can't remember, or maybe our spirits met while we were asleep, and they became friends.
I thought, it is probably not a good idea to obliquely tell the doctor that I might be crazy. My self-written certificate of sanity might not be enough to convince the police that I am fine really. Who wants to be convicted of fraud while being held under the Mental Health Act? Not me!
I had tried everything I could think of to convince the doctor's surgery receptionist that it was a good idea to cancel someone else's appointment, employ a new permanent doctor, make the doctors work longer hours, or just send me for an x-ray because I think that is what any right-minded doctor will do anyway.
'The waiting list is four weeks for a face-to face appointment.'
It is anti-useful to pontificate on how you know anything about the process of triage and the results of examination for a joint injury. All that happens is that you get sidelined for being 'difficult'.
'Ooh, It hurts!' I moaned. 'Is the waiting list still four weeks?' I asked, hopefully. Keep it light, Martin. Frustration is your worst enemy.
'The waiting list for a telephone appointment is also four weeks.'
I knew that something was amiss. Somewhere, in some dark corner, there was an obstruction, a blockage of some kind. I thought maybe there is an overall resentment in the whole doctors surgery. Maybe, feeling overwhelmed, the doctors had reverted to a wooden approach to dealing with their patients. When you can't think of a good solution to a problem, use a regimented approach. Tick-Tock, by the formulaic clock. Why not? In most cases a spreadsheet provides all the answers I need, so I have to allow in my mind that doctors secrete themselves behind logic to save themselves from being too nice. In any case, how do they show support for junior doctors if they just keep on working?
I was pedaling fast in my mind and getting nowhere.
The waiting patients behind me were either having the time of their lives in silent, and still, fits of laughter, or suffused with contempt for me. I couldn't really tell. People are like that in doctors surgeries. You have to poke them with a stick to make sure they are still breathing.
By now about six or seven minutes had passed.
'I kind of need to know if I should rest it or use it. Different injuries have different things that need to be done to help it heal.'
After a minute, the receptionist said, 'There is an appointment available at nine o'clock tonight. How about that? It won't be one of our own doctors though.' Most people would have leapt at that. 'Good Crikeyness. Yes! Oh Yes! Thank you sooo much.' Not me. I have PTSD which makes going to sleep really hard for me. I don't want to go to sleep. In my mind, it is dangerous to sleep. I have spent years building a bedtime routine that lets me go to sleep at 21:30 o'clock / half past nine / nine thirty in the evening/ 9:30 pm. (Choose one according to your age group). It takes three hours of preparation for me to be ready for bed. Coming home at half past nine in the evening means bed-time would be moved to midnight or beyond.
I ummed and aahed. The air in the doctor's surgery grew frigid as the waiting patients collectively thought, 'What an idiot. He is a most difficult person. What is wrong with you?' Good question. I hope they never find out, because it won't be through the use of words; it can only be known by personal experience.
'Okay, I will come back at nine o'clock.' I have had one of these emergency appointments before. The doctor at the end of that appointment gave me a rictus smile, you know, frozen and fake, but her smile did not have the gaping mouth of a skeleton; her teeth were firmly clamped together. That was months ago and it still troubles me now. I was certain it would be the same doctor and I started to plan what I might say to prevent her from giving me her limited version of a Pan Am smile. Oh Goodness, what if she has been practising in front of a mirror, and that is the best she can do? I don't want to hurt her feelings.
I hate appointments. I can't concentrate on anything. I can't read or think. I cannot switch off and wait for my internal alarm clock, timer thing, to alert me to my responsibilities to other people. I know; many other people do exactly that, and are late. They will never be my friends.
I went to the surgery at twenty five minutes to nine, freshly bathed and smelling fantastic. I needed everything I could get to help me speed the doctor into just glancing at me and saying, 'I will send you for an X-ray.' If the examination is really short, I might be able to pretend that I had never been there and go to bed soon after returning home.
I thought that the surgery would be locked up and I would have to ring the bell on the door or something. As I came up the lane towards the car-park, in my mind, the glass-paned door, that was usually there, had turned into a heavy oak door with a large knocker shaped like a gargoyle, and I expected someone to answer my pounding knock by peering round the cracked-open door while a scream faded in the background. Bringing in a doctor from outside the practice could only mean someone who was struck off the medical register, surely.
The door was acting normal though, and it was unlocked, just like it always was between the opening hours of 0800 and 1800 hrs (8am - 6pm). There was a Polish receptionist with earbuds in her ears behind the counter.
I sat down and had a one-sided conversation with a man wearing a hearing aid. He could hear me, but I could not make out his words. I don't even know if he was speaking English. Have I arrived at the right place? I thought. It looks like my doctors surgery, but the patients are not quite right. Either I am supremely interesting or this man wants to eat me.
Having accidentally ignored the receptionist, she called me over. That is how I know she is Polish. She told me that there was a half hour delay because the doctor had seen 'a complicated woman' who had taken an hour of the doctor's time. Oooh! Lots for me to work on with THAT statement. Untangling a person's thoughts might take a long time, I surmised. Getting that woman to lie still so the ghouls out the back can harvest her energy might take a long time. Finally, I settled on, 'Oh! Poor woman. I hope she is okay!' Well, obviously she isn't, but you know. I made a mental note to make sure I am coherently succinct in future.
When the man wearing the hearing aid was called, I foisted myself onto the receptionist's attention and we ended up talking about striking doctor's, no! doctors striking, and nurses' pay. When her eyes started to glaze over very slightly I stopped talking.
'Do you work in sales?' she asked.
I used to be self-employed and so, yes, I did.
'You are very......convincing.' she finished. Oh dear, I thought. Too much. eh?
I have had so many conversations on wages and unfair pay that it really isn't difficult for me to organise an argument for only paying high wages to kind people regardless of their qualifications, and stuff everyone else. Well, I always leave the last bit hanging for the brow-beaten person to independently come up with that. The thought is already formed in their minds, it just needs to be brought out into the open. Hopefully, THEIR open, not 'the' open. Selfishness has no place at the boardroom table in my head.
When I was called by the doctor, I was delighted to discover that she had been shaped by whoever was controlling this wonderful world of mystery, into the type of mature woman who would, if she is in her garden, have a woven willow basket full of flowers and a straw hat with roses tucked into the band around it. Well done! I thought. This is a woman right out of the 1950s, who belongs in an Enid Blyton book, and was probably schooled at Mallory Towers, a private girl's school. This, I thought, is the wife of the man who is a retired vicar who wears slippers and smokes a pipe while petting their Red Setter dog by an open fire.
Suitably reassured that I was in safe hands, I let her manipulate my leg into different shapes for about ten or fifteen minutes.
'You need an X-ray.' she said. I knew that. I told her I would like an X-ray on my elbow as well, because there seems to be a bone chip that isn't in a good place. She acquiesced, because she knew she had already shown herself to be competent, and a cursory examination of my elbow would suffice to demonstrate to me, that she was paying attention. I told her that I was familiar with the triage process and the passing on to the local hospital for this kind of elbow injury. She was content with that, I think.
When I got back to the waiting room, limping, there were two patients there.
'Sports injury.' I said. I had noticed that one of the men was wearing shorts that had embroidery down the side that indicated he was a member of a rugby club. At first, he saw a pathetic limping man, but now he saw a powerful and energetic brute!
Of course it's deceit, but Google had told me that I had damaged my medial collateral ligament, and that means it's a sports injury. Maybe I just can't remember playing sports in the middle of the night a month ago. I prefer to think I was merely offering options. Let's leave it at that.