For the first time since I caught Covid back in September of last year, almost certainly on an Air Canada A330 (one for the anoraks, there), I don’t have a cough that terrifies everyone into thinking I have Covid. I can now get through an entire day without reaching for my asthma inhaler. Better still, I can walk relatively normal distances without getting hopelessly out of breath. Rejoice! Maybe I’m not quite ready for the Knackers Yard just yet, after all?
No thanks, I’m afraid, to our local NHS, I have to say, who have been completely useless every time I have contacted them. I had to nearly beg to get to have chest X Rays in order to check there wasn’t anything more serious going on and then beg again to get the results. When my persistent cough remained persistent, the local health centre referred me to a ‘prescribing pharmacist’ who, it turned out couldn’t prescribe anything for me. At least he came up with an accurate diagnosis. I had a cough. Who knew? With my life-threatening Man Flu out of the way, I could now concentrate on my mental health.
To my utter astonishment, just five weeks and one day after seeking help and advice with my ailing mental health, a doctor called me. Not a clinician or a nurse: an actual GP. It was also a doctor I had spoken to before, but never met, and they proceeded to start off on exactly the right note: “I have no idea why I’ve been asked to call you because no one left a note, so I am winging it a bit. How can I help you?” (I have paraphrased a bit here, but the “winging it” bit is true.) What to say to that?
I have been “under the doctor” (ooh er, missus!) since I was 12 years ago for various mental things. Sometimes I feel particularly shit, like I did when I contacted the surgery five weeks and one day ago, but mostly, aided and abetted by ADHD and Christ knows what else, I stumble through life with all the delicate precision of Bambi on ice. I can’t sum this up in a couple of sentences and, predictably, my brain turned to Papier-mâché (they have a saying for it in France). I tried to explain I was bad, now I’m not too bad, but I could be bad again tomorrow, but I had “a moment”. And that moment was that I knew it was all over. I have known that I have been flogging the dead horse of NHS psychiatry for decades and as the GP calmly and politely explained that – and here I paraphrase again – there’s nothing more the NHS can do for me, that really is it now.
I pushed my luck and asked whether there were any more diagnostic tests available that could make my life more bearable, if only to enable me to make more sense of my head and why it doesn’t work properly and got the only answer I was ever going to get. No, with added, “are you fucking serious? Anyway, and I am not being ageist but you’re way too old and if I out you on a waiting list, you’ll probably be dead by the time you are seen.” (I made that last paragraph up, but that’s how it sounded to me.)
Today I have no cough and I am only moderately depressed. That’s much better than five weeks and one day ago when I had the mother of all coughs and was in near mental despair. Both conditions have passed, sort of, and I’m moving on, certain in the knowledge that I was born mental and that’s how I will die.
A footnote is that the GP suggested I may have, or have had, long Covid, again something I had worked out for myself. “We know next to fuck all about the long term effects of Covid,” he didn’t add. “But it’s possible.” You might have to read about my mental state of mind again in the future, especially in my non-awaited memoir which is still nowhere near to being finished, but asking the NHS? Nah. I know when I’m beaten. I should have realised that a long, long time ago.
