I wrote this yesterday but watched TV and fell asleep instead of posting it. As it’s easier to add a note rather than rewrite it to keep the timeline consistent, that’s what I’m doing. The lazy ways are often the best.

In my first post today I said that the brain is a strange place. I’ve just been on the phone to the doctor – the phone system of the NHS is an even stranger place.

I have just had a text from the doctor to tell me to make an appointment to talk to her about my recent MRI scan. So I did. It seems I can’t make an appointment to talk to the doctor now (4pm) I have to ring tomorrow morning at 8am. At that point I can join the queue, or, if it’s a long queue, I can be denied a place in it by a robotic voice and a theatrical click signifying they have cut me off.

As I said, it doesn’t really seem worth overloading the system and involving other people when all I need is a phone call telling me what I already know. How do I know, they asked? Because it’s already been entered on my records, which I have access to. It says “Abnormal but expected”. That’s exactly as I expected because I had an X-Ray months ago which told me that. The nurse also told me that. The receptionist checked. “It says ‘abnormal but expected'”, she said.

It means that I have arthritis in a number of joints. They were expecting that. They were actually looking for an infection in the bone. There isn’t one, but that was also expected as I had an X-Ray nearly three months ago.

It’s a good thing, when you look at the timescale, that there is no  infection. If there had been, it might have been quite serious by now. But probably not, as I’ve had the swollen toe for two years now without incident. Doctors worry. Sometimes they worry about patient welfare, at other times they worry about being sued or struck off. Either way, I’ve always had more treatment than I want from doctors. They live to find illness and give out pills, but I won’t go in that direction today.

Doctors like to be certain about these things, which I appreciate, but the system creaks a bit in practice. It’s like the urgent X-Ray I once had. Twenty four hours to get the X-Ray, 28 days to get the results. That came back marked “No sinister signs” It felt like I’d been X-Rayed by Dracula.

You don’t even need a highly-trained doctor to read out the results anyway. I’m sure it’s a simple admin job once the report is done. If I can understand it, it can’t be hard.

Sometimes I think what the NHS needs is just a bit of common sense and someone who can spot bottlenecks. It doesn’t need doctors and highly paid management consultants getting involved, they could just ask me.

Maybe I should write and see if they need any help . . .

Photos are from May 2018