Humourless doctors.
Had a bad day on Friday. I’d been feeling a bit unwell on Thursday morning and on and off during the day. It got bad enough to prompt me to make a doctors appointment on Friday morning. So, in I toddled. The doctor was making a flap about blood clots, lungs and “why didn’t you come in sooner?”.
So, off to hospital I went, to spend the rest of the day attached to various machines and being poked and prodded and jabbed by all manner of pointy devices. At one point I had a nurse taking my blood pressure at one side and another drawing blood from the other arm (in a particularly ham-fisted manner which resulted in a very large pool of it on the floor). A young doctor came up and stood in the middle and I asked if he’d come to stand between the other two and hit me with a stick. Not a trace of a smile.
Anyway, off for chest X-rays, some more blood tests and then left alone for three hours to think about it. You can imagine. As it turns out, I stopped smoking a couple of months ago and by the time the doctor came back I had convinced myself that he was going to start talking about lung cancer.
As it turns out, there had been a blood clot involved, but it had broken up on its own with a little help from some warfarin (which I always though was rat poison, but never mind). I’ve been overdoing it a little – because I’m very out of shape (too many videogames and not enough exercise) all the stuff I’ve been doing (swimming and so on) since stopping smoking has just been too much. So, I’ve to take it easy for a day or two and then try a sensible exercise regime – starting with walking.
It was a very scary thing.
