These weird experiences get weirder by the day.
A week ago I started to get a pain in my chest. Not too bad, just a sort of stitch. By Thursday it was fairly severe and I decided to go to the doctor. Naturally, they can't fit me in until 5pm, so by 5:10 I am explaining the problem to the Doc'.
He checks the result of the cholesterol test I had earlier this week. I score 5.7, not bad but just a touch higher than good. So then I get a lecture about reducing cholesterol by good diet. Imagine this; a man so fat that he spills over the chair, so large that he never actually lifts or shifts in his seat (there's no space), with a belly that M.Creosote's younger brother would be proud of, explaining that I should eat white meat not red, skip the butter and cream... In fact, in a few short moments he recommended to me my current diet. I find myself checking to see if my belt has another hole in it in case I get any thinner. It doesn't.
He seems to keep his paper stock in a cupboard under his desk. He tries to find a blank sheet of paper. He could not reach down into the cupboard, could not tidy the jumbled mess of paper. He cannot bend his body over the mass of blubber that passes for a waistline. Eventually he extracted a slightly crumpled sheet and carefully writes a short letter. "Take this to A&E."
So I get a cab and go to St George's. The driver took a very strange route. It made me wonder that if this was a real emergency, how would I handle a driver with no sense of direction and no knowledge of traffc levels at 6pm on a London Friday?
Eventually I was called in to a triage room. The nurse told me to take off my T-shirt, and I'm a little taken aback at the reaction to the sight of my chest. While the electrodes are being stuck to my body, I am treated to a few suggestions that the ladies might prefer it if I were "trimmed" a bit. I respond by saying that some girls seem to like running their fingers through the hair, and am then told that it is very long. Suddenly I realise that the nurse might be taking a bit of a fancy to me. Makes me chuckle. He's right out of luck!
The ECG shows that I am not having a heart attack, so the next stage is to get an X-ray. Luckily, there's nothing unexpected on the picture, but I am surprised at the quality and detail. I like the look of my ribs.
Time to take blood. After several phials of the red stuff are extracted (I'm sure the needles don't hurt as much these days) I am consigned to a row of seats to wait for the test results. They are going to check for infections, clots, etc, etc.
And so I meet strange bloke.
We probably talked for an hour or more. He was a weird one, the sort of guy you hear talking for a moment, and then quickly avoid. He'd had cancer, a malignant melnoma. It just started with a mole on the sole, but by the time they had finished he had skin grafts and lymph nodes removed. Like me, he was amazed at how many different types of pain there are. But that night he was just accompanying his mother. She has serious dimentia.
As we talked I realised he was always focusing on the positive side. I was acutely conscious of my immediate but unspoken answer to everything he said; for every positive statement I seemed to have a negative response. I learned a lesson that night, but I didn't use the phone number he gave me.
And after about 3-4 hours they said "Go home. You're OK".
