Promptly at eight thirty this morning, the surgery nurse clicked a switch, and the blood pressure cuff around my arm tightened automatically and gave a reading.
Using the same arm she quickly took a blood sample.
Within seven minutes I was back home drinking the cup of tea I’d prepared just as I was about to leave the house. After a twelve hour fast it tasted like nectar.
My BP was fine, and if the blood test comes back satisfactorily, and nothing else crops up healthwise it’ll be another six months where I shan’t lay eyes on my doctor.
In fact after eight years of being a patient, if they put the doctor who gets paid to look after me in a line up I wouldn’t recognise him and he certainly wouldn’t recognise me!
In the old days if we needed to see the doctor, we had to decide if we were we well enough for the ten minute walk to his surgery, or should we call him in.
If we were walking wounded it was always a pleasure to go to the surgery, which was two small rooms at the bottom of a cobbled courtyard behind an old Tudor building.
In the winter an ancient gas fire popped and spluttered, its flames reflected in the highly polished assortment of chairs and dark green lino, all relics from a past age.
I could never make my mind up whether I preferred the waiting room’s dark comfy warmth, or the warm days when the door was propped open, and we could look out at a gnarled wisteria and smell the perfume from the tangle of old fashioned plants that survived year after year in the opposite corner of the courtyard.
There were no appointments: no numbered cards; no receptionist, not even an intercom. No nurse or nurse practitioner, phone system or computer.
Everyone seemed capable of remembering whose turn it was to see our one and only doctor, and it was more than our life was worth if we fidgeted or made a noise while we waited our turn. We might have to wait an hour or so to see him, but it was rarely longer and no one complained.
If we needed a blood test he would take a massive glass syringe from his autoclave, draw what looked like a pint of blood, squirt it into another tube to be sent to the hospital, and he’d have the result back in a few days.
There was a morning and evening surgery five days a week and home visits were made during the afternoon.
If you had a home visit he’d follow it up three days later to see if you were going on ok, or come in daily if you were really poorly. He also did night time and weekend home visits because few of his patients owned a car and were able to travel to him.
He knew all his patients and their families by name and by ailment, and never gave shoddy advice or treatment and sat with us all night delivering our babies or compassionately seeing us out of this world.
He was the Family Doctor with the emphasis on family, and I mourn his passing.
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