Medics in need of some sort of medical help

Some scary stories about our free health service do the rounds, but personally I've only ever been treated off-handly once in an NHS situation. I had to see a medic with a decidedly foreign name a few times.

I use the expression 'see' because on my several visits, he never saw me.

The specialist had positioned his desk facing the wall opposite the door, and he would stare into the screen of a computer, over-fed back towards me, while he went through the old health question routine.

I hoped he would ask, 'Und how is you lookink today?'

Then I could have said, 'How does it look?' Or, 'What do you think?' Then - presumably - he would have had to break the screen's entrancement. He didn't oblige there either.

A bizarre NHS consultation

I want to tell you of a bizarre NHS consultation last week to beat them all. It happened to an admired friend.

But first let's adjust the record with an anecdote from a private hospital recommended to me about three years ago, or so. That was for a consultation with a specialist.

The visit certainly set me back more than I could afford at the time. However, he was well recommended as perhaps THE specialist for a problem I feared I might have.

I approached the very busy private hospital's reception counter. Before I could offer, 'Good afternoon' to the woman in a nurse's costume and the sourest expression behind the counter, she commanded, 'Your credit card.'

'It's okay. I paid in advance.'

'Your credit card!' she repeated in a tone seemingly borrowed from a World War 2 film, although she didn't click her heels. It transpired that I couldn't go further into the hospital without the card being open and ready to receive fees.

A sarcastic snarl

The reception from the specialist himself was not much of a step up. His department's roomy waiting room was packed. The doctor entered and shouted my name. I stood up. He demanded to know if I was the man he had named.

'I think so,' I said, not being exactly delighted at an absence of the privacy normally offered in medical situations. In a sarcastic snarl that many of my high school teachers from decades ago would have envied, he said, 'You think you are!

Continues on the blogs for my ocean adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com