Should I... Shouldn't I?

I’m still wheezing like an old asthmatic on forty fags a day. It’s got really boring.

On Thursday I was standing in the chemists telling the pharmacist about my wheezing and asking for advice when another customer butted in and said ‘Don’t you think you should go to the doctors? What with all this swine flu about…’ I was outraged. How dare she acknowledge she was listening; I could’ve been talking about something really embarrassing. For a moment I considered describing my phlegm in gross and luxuriant detail… and then I said. ‘I was ill a week ago, I didn’t have a high temperature which means it's unlikely to have been swine flu, so no, I don’t think I need to see the doctor…’

However, yesterday, because I was at the hospital for my thyroid, I went in to see someone about my chest as well. I was discharged from him with the prerequisite myriad medicines. This always happens here because (I am told) the doctors make some money on each item prescribed. This is wrong; so wrong. And I hate it.

But I didn’t take the antibiotics; partly because I worry about this prescribing unnecessary medicines thing and partly because I thought I was on the mend… Anyway if it’s viral still and not a bacterial infection the antibiotics won’t help.

And now it’s 5.30 in the afternoon, my chest hurts, my head hurts and I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe I should take the bloody tablets.

This picture was taken in Siam sky train station today. Anti-bacterial handgel is available all over the place and many people are wearing masks. What’s it like in the UK?

Introducing...

I’m continuing the medical theme here today.

This is Toby.

Toby was a male of about 17 or 18 and family history reports that he was probably from Russia or France. Of course there are no guarantees that the whole skeleton belonged to one person but the long bones and the sutures in the skull inform us of his approximate age. The pelvis identifies his gender. All medical students are required a half skeleton though now they are man made and not real ones.

Toby is almost a member of our family. He was purchased as half a skeleton from Adam, Rouilly in the early 1930s for the start of Cousin Bing’s medical degree at the Middlesex Hospital. Albert Vivian (“Bing”) Stevens (he could sing like his namesake) is from my Welsh family. He qualified in 1939, joined up and went straight to France in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Cousin Bing was awarded the Military Cross for a string of acts of bravery recorded in Dunkirk. It was only after he died that we discovered he had also been awarded an OBE for work to alleviate disease during the Bengal famine. He never spoke about it.

After Bing died in 1997, the Imperial War Museum contacted his widow, Margaret, to ask if they might be able to have the personal papers relating to the time in Calcutta.

Next, Toby the skeleton went…

Explanation

Thanks to everyone who sent positive wishes after my odd (and cryptic) post on Monday. The medical procedure wasn’t mine to blog about but I’m glad to say that nothing nasty was found. There is one more test to exclude all other issues.

Being a doctor’s daughter (also a doctor’s sister and doctor’s cousin) I’ve spent my youth surrounded by medical matters. Dinner time conversations were colourful and graphic enough to make many a guest wilt at our table. I’ve always loved medical dramas, and get terribly over-excited when I diagnose before the doctors do. (I specialise in identifying Weil’s Disease, Munchausen’s by proxy and Leukaemia which appear to be favourites in medical soaps.)

My Dad’s speciality was endoscopy. You can, if you are strong of stomach, look here but it might be enough to know that it is looking into the body, in my Dad’s case, through a natural opening, *coughs* using an endoscope, a thin bendy tube with a light source that projects what it sees onto a screen for the doc to diagnose.

But, and maybe no-one’s very good at this, we’re not terribly cool or calm when it comes to our own health. Maybe we know too much.

Anyway, thank you for your thoughts; they really helped.