Martyr!
No! H'm possibly...my body is a temple.
And I
should just say, before I continue, my surgery is good; my doctor's
lovely, in spite of the odd admin mix-up: duplicate letters and phone
calls, so that there were times I felt I was going mad. Haven't I had
this conversation? Haven't I received this communication or made this
appointment already?
Anyhow,
last year I got to know that waiting room quite well, along with some
others I wouldn't have otherwise had the occasion to see. And by
doing so accumulated a whole shopping basket of tests, which had I
gone in with a list would have read a little something like this: 1
physical examination; 1 planned surgical procedure (which didn't go
ahead as proved unnecessary); 2 blood tests - 1 full MOT and 1
specific; 1 scan; 2 (very nearly 3) ECGs – the machine didn't like
me or my heart didn't want to be read; and 1 clinical assessment.
With of course subsequent follow-ups and consultations and an
accompanying bundle of paperwork. I could start a file. And a fire,
if I didn't want to leave it to posterity, and I don't. But whilst
I'm living I suppose a paper record might come in handy.
All quite
dizzying, really, when I was in it, and even when I look back. Am I
still in its throes? The jaws of death. Well, okay, not death. Did I
mention I can be a little melodramatic? Poetic licence.
But am I
in its throes: the rounds of professionals and appointments? Well,
it's possible. I'm not a crystal-ball gazer, though some of my
articles when published a year or so later are often quite prophetic.
It's not a gift because I don't know when and if I'm tapping into it.
In other words: Fat lot of good it does me.
Am I
writing like Isherwood yet? Christopher. That was an ambition. A year
on maybe it still is and maybe I'm still reading him. A back
catalogue of Christopher and his collection of persons. I should have
taken him to these waiting rooms.
I
can never sit and read in them, not even idly flick through a very
out of date magazine. No, I sit, alert like a dog, poised for action.
My surgery is a warren of treatment rooms, so in my head I'm planning
my strategy i.e. the quickest route to the right door from where I'm
sitting and whose legs I might have to disturb, have to brush
against. I'll have to be careful not to hit them with my handbag or
elbow them – and my elbows are sharp - in the head or eye. I
wouldn't want to add to anybody's ailments. Or add to mine by
tripping over pram wheels or toddlers who have become bored with
coloured bricks and are running around, waving their arms. And it
could
happen,
not that I'm known to be clumsy but fretting makes something more
liable to happen. Self-consciousness 101, but there isn't a room for
that, not a physical one. Maybe a different surgery has one?
So, I sit
and wait, on the edge of an uncomfortable seat, for my name to be
flashed up on a screen and then called in a robotic female voice;
usually I jump up as soon as my name appears rather than stay to hear
how she might pronounce it, not that it's a difficult to say but
because I seem to presume that the quicker I leave the waiting room
the less people will put my person and it together. I mean, in that
year alone, I was able to put quite a few names to local faces, and
some of them stuck, so that if I see them around now it feels odd: I
possess a detail about them and they don't know I have it.
What was
my problem? I'm more like a woman of sixty-five than a woman of
thirty-nine.
Picture credit: Portrait of a Lady in a Lace-edged Dress, 1915, Frank Dicksee (source: WikiArt)
