So I had a long awaited doctors appointment last week. This surgery doesn’t exactly have, how shall I say, the nicest class of patients – all chapping at the bit to get their weekend prescriptions. They don’t have an appointment system on Friday afternoons so it was pretty much a case of first come first serve. Boy, was the waiting room fun & games.

Take the guy nearest the door, headphones blaring, looking like he’s about to slit his wrists.

The dude hiding behind the tree in the corner, off his face on heroin.

The chav couple with their kid who’s going cross eyed staring at the mobile phone he shouldn’t be using. Mum doesn’t say much but dad, who has that terrible AID’s look about him, is F’ing & C’ing left & right. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, a friend of his comes back into the waiting room to pick up his tracksuit glad, heavily pregnant girlfriend where Mr Subtlety asks him, along with a particular hand gesture that’d make the queen blush, if it was “something dirty”

Niiiiice.

Then there was the Muslim woman with her two brats – Dad dropped the kids off, headphones in, not a word to mum – I soon understood why he dropped & ran – However, I was fooled into thinking they were cute when they arrived. Oh how wrong I was.

In the part of town we were, I was surprised she wasn’t making more effort not to draw attention to herself. But no, her spawn were screaming & shouting, throwing the toys around, hitting one another.. not once did she tell them off. That was until the girl sat next to me, after a load of huffing & puffing, gets up & stands for a good 10 minutes, glaring… eyes wide, jaw dropped. She was raging! I swear to Satan I thought she was going to go fucking mental & kill all three of them. So there’s me preparing myself to rugby tackle her.

Mentioning the family to the receptionist – they are well known there, for doing the same thing every week surprise, surprise – my doctor overhears me mentioning the mental case about to lose her rag with them & she says, “aye, well she was dead itchy!”.

What the…? I don’t even want to know. But really, Doctor patient confidentiality much?

Fuck me, still makes me laugh now.

My dad didn’t let me down either, when the Muslim family were called through he declared loud & clear “I do hope it’s nothing terminal!”.

Oh how I’ve missed home.

More to the point, the Doctor gave me Propanolol for my anxiety & it seems to work pretty well but I’m yet to find myself in a situation where I’m freaking the fuck out. Like she said, now that I have something for it I won’t have another attack. If only that were true, but I’m happy so far. It beats being back on Citalopram that’s for sure.

Thinking about this last night, I remembered she took my blood pressure – the left arm of course – & the fact that arm is covered in evident SI scars never even entered my mind. The first doctor to ever put me at ease. In that particular surgery they really will have seen it all I know, but well done that woman!