Michael Sparrow - Country Doctor

Hilarious True Stories from
a Country Practice

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More Riotous Stories from the
Country Practice

Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2002

Copyright Michael Sparrow 2002

The right of Michael Sparrow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78033-051-8
eISBN: 978-1-47210-799-2

Printed and bound in the EU

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For my children, Charlie and Cressie, and in memory of my mother, Mary Blackmore, ne Hopkins, who died after a short illness on 5 August 2001, several months prior to publication.

She did, however, manage to read a copy of both this and the draft of the next book in the last week of her life. Oh, she said as she put it down for the final time. So thats what youve been doing for the past twenty-five years...

The author wishes to thank all those who have helped unwittingly or otherwise and encouraged during the production of this book, but a special note of thanks to Lorna Hartley, who typed the very first draft and without whom this would still be sitting at the back of some dusty cupboard written on odd scraps of paper. So for all of you who do not enjoy what you are about to read its her fault.

A couple of years ago, one of the august weekly medical journals for GPs we refer to them reverentially as the comics ran a writing competition under the heading What advice would you give to prospective GPs?

I have no idea what they expected carefully researched tributes to the exquisite delights and vocational rewards of our chosen profession, perhaps?

What they got was something rather different.

One entrant, for example who failed to secure one of the ten winners slots but was unanimously voted for a life peerage by us all simply wrote, Dont do it, dont do it, dont do it... two hundred times, and we all knew how he felt.

Collectively we advanced enough reasons to avoid the job to put off a whole generation of putative doctors for life. Our entries remain locked in an underground vault, to be published posthumously.

The ten winners were invited to a weekend jamboree in Tunbridge Wells, where we soberly assessed the thrills of our profession, the sheer unadulterated pleasure of spending our days face to face with the collective woes of the general public, and the craftsmanship of writing. It took all of five minutes, and then we repaired to the bar, this particular discussion being over for the night.

What now follows is an amended version of what I then wrote, which along with the other nine entries should be force-fed to all sixth-formers as they consider their future career prospects. Beyond that, a collection of anecdotes from now some twenty years in medicine, neither wholly autobiographical nor terribly chronological, but more like a busy morning surgery the day after a bank holiday.

It is the one everlasting joy of general practice. You never quite know what is going to walk through the door next.

To a Prospective GP...

Dear son,

I know you are considering taking up general practice as a career. May I give you some advice.

1. Watch every episode of Peak Practice, twice its brilliant. Marvel at their dedication. Thrill to their diagnostic skills. Rejoice at their successes and empathise with their tragedies. Wonder how come they only ever see one patient per week. Count how many times Andrew smiles during any one episode. And then disregard everything you see. Its just not like that at all.

2. Get yourself fit. I suggest running up a down escalator for ten hours a day. Capture that feeling at the end of each session, and remember it well. We call it exhaustion, and it will stay with you for the rest of your career.

3. Enroll with RADA. It will help you cultivate that expression of concerned professionalism, behind which are your true thoughts If I can dispense with Mrs Pembertons leg ulcers in the next five minutes, I can still get in nine holes of golf before lunch.

4. Get yourself a very large mirror. Practise before it for six hours a day until you can say, Its only a virus, and I know how you feel, not to mention Theres a lot of it about, without giggling helplessly.

5. Spend as much time as you can with a circus. Run away with it if possible, but if not, then study the man who balances twenty spinning plates on long poles (do not be put off by the fact that you recognise him as being also the Lithuanian tight-rope walker). Note how he always attends to the most needy first. And before you leave, enter the cage full of lions. Its not quite so bad as a packed waiting room on a rainy Monday morning, but boy, is it close.

6. Start smoking, and persevere. Then no matter how bad it may get, you will still be able to enjoy yourself up to twenty times a day.

7. Practise self-catheterisation, and subscribe to a Teach Yourself Colonic Irrigation course. Only then will you understand what it can be like to deal with health service administrators.

8. Develop a liking for Lambrusco and cheap whisky. I know it will be hard, but it is all your patients will ever buy you for Christmas.

9. Let every meal you sit down to go cold, and stodgy. Ask a close friend to bleep you every time you get into a hot bath, or when England look poised to win at anything, and learn to cope with the inevitable frustration that will follow.

10. Invest in the Which? guide to divorce. Do not be deterred by the fact that you are not yet married you will be, and then you will not.

11. Read all the political columns of the broadsheet newspapers. Become a doctor of spin, as well as of medicine.

12. Purchase the most uncomfortable bed on the market. That way, you will never mind leaving it on a cold winters morning.

These are the twelve commandments. As my old Latin master used to say learn, inwardly digest, and repeat at will.

And should all else fail, just study your father. Observe his stress-free countenance. Rejoice at his new-found joie de vivre, marvel at his careless good humour.

Recall that you have only seen him thus since he took early retirement. Recall, in fact, that you have scarcely seen him at all before that fateful day, and that one day you too will have children.

Ask yourself is that what you really want?

And finally, we will one day meet at one of our funerals. I pray that it is mine. And not yours...

All this, of course, is now incidental for the likes of me. Twenty years qualified and beyond the realms of reason, no longer do we ask ourselves why we became a GP, but only why we still are one.

And I have two answers:

1. Because I am no longer trained for, or capable of doing, anything else.

2. And because if I wasnt a GP, then none of the following would have happened.

And somehow I would have missed it.