Grumps, Part Two...

Well, it's day three or so of grumpy old sod with a sore throat, although the affliction has an upside for everyone else in that I can barely speak, let alone swear at politicians on the TV and radio. [Above, my favourite cap, which looks and is an awful lot older than the photo suggests.] Still,  I made reasonably swift progress towards getting treatment this morning, having successfully navigated the GP practice's automated system through to the receptionist, so I could book a doctor callback.

The first attempt started with the following exchange... Receptionist: "... I can't really hear you, your line's very clicky ..." Me: "... I'm afraid it's my voice that's clicky...". At least that lightened the conversation, which always helps when you feel like death warmed up, and so unused as I am - I'll come to the reason - to the current processes, that presently I assumed I'd been cut off when the line went dead, rather than realizing that my slot was already booked and that she wasn't actually putting me through to the GP there and then - I've not been firing on all cylinders for the last two days - so I rang back and was reminded how things worked. With courtesy and forbearance, I might add.

Later, I had a call-back at the precise moment I'd just turned on the shower, just as predicted ten minutes earlier. Fortunately, I'd only just done that - turned on the shower - and so my hands were dry enough to open my iPhone [try doing that with soaking fingers!] and take the call from a very sympathetic and understanding doctor. I was thinking I'd probably have to go down to the surgery for examination, so I'd already done a negative Covid test in advance, which was, as it turned out, unnecessary. My prescription was filled out by the time I got to the pharmacy, no visit necessary.

The reason for my unfamiliarity with the practice modus operandi, is, as I mentioned to the GP, that I'm not a frequent flyer - time-waster, hypochondriac or whatever - at the practice. She said she'd already picked up that fact from my notes, and that I'd not been prescribed antibiotics since 2013. In fact, my last visit was probably eight years ago. I'd already described the symptoms in detail and my history with strep throat, stretching back fifty years or so, to my junior school days.

It's my sixth brush with this nasty little infection since then, each separated by around a decade, and on two occasions badly, with one bout leaving me bedridden across a Christmas and New Year's holiday, schlepping to and from our then - similarly afflicted - local pharmacist, who gamely got out of his bed on several occasions fill my prescriptions for successively more powerful drugs to try and stop me from croaking in the colloquial rather than literal sense, himself in considerable pain. We both ended up on the nuclear option, a drug so vicious in operation that if not fully swallowed, would cause serious internal injury to the person taking them. Given I could barely swallow water, let alone solids, this revelation was of little comfort, but times was desperate, boi.

Based on my normal epidemiological timescale, I'll be about eighty before - hopefully not - it strikes me down again. If I indeed make that particular anniversaire, maybe by then the current disease control and treatment technologies will have continued to improve exponentially. The downside is that we might, by then, be feeling the full effects of climate chaos, with diseases mutating at a similar rate to scupper our hubristic expectation of 'taming' nature. I told you I was in a bad mood, [part two]...