The doctor dilemma

Even when he’s genuinely under the weather, Paul Carter wrestles with why he’s reluctant to see a doctor

Sorry to report that since I last put drivel to paper, I’ve been a bit off-colour.

For a while there I was very much stuck in a world of cold sweats, Lucozade, and longing for the times when days off sick meant watching re-runs of Thundercats, Happy Days and The Monkees TV show, rather than pathetically trying to respond to work emails on the Blackberry from under a duvet.

I’ve been reliably informed by just about everyone since I fought bravely back into work though that “there’s something going around, I think”.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is always something “going around” though isn’t there? Whether it’s a cough, a cold or the bubonic plague, it’s always something.

However ill I get though, I try my hardest not to give in and go to the doctor’s, largely because I find it such a massive ballache (not literally, or I would go).

I think many GPs would find being faced with the human incarnation of the smallpox virus less terrifying than looking up to see little old disabled me skulking through their surgery door.

You can see the panic on their faces, almost like they’re expecting me to say “hello doctor, I’ve woken up this morning and something most awful has happened.

I passed glance upon my extremities and could not fail to discover that my arms appear to have fallen off”. (I also imagine my conversations with doctors take place in a cod-Victorian dialect. I’m not really sure why.)

If they don’t think you’ve come about the glaringly obviously incurable, they react as if someone made of the most delicate crystal known to man has just presented. Either that or they seem convinced that whatever I may have wrong with me, is related to my impairment, as if there’s some undiscovered link between vomiting and leglessness. Actually, come to think of it…

However, I do remember one time back when I was a student, I went to the doctor’s once only to be told that, in fact, he couldn’t do anything for me, as I had a virus.

Now apparently viruses aren’t alive or something, I’m not sure I wasn’t really listening, so antibiotics or voodoo or whatever it is they use these days wouldn’t work. So helpfully, they gave me a leaflet, which spent three pages telling me even more helpfully they couldn’t do anything for me. Because I had a virus! That was a worthwhile trip, the leaflet did actually help though. I felt so damned cold by the time I’d done a round trip to the surgery that I set fire to it.

Anyhow, I’m off to look pitifully at strangers in the vain hope of getting some sympathy. Cough cough.