Given that the NHS has all but admitted there is nothing it can do about my mental health, then I am at least slightly assured that it can improve or at least maintain my physical health. I am on so much medication these days that you can almost hear me rattle as I approach, yet still I appear to be falling apart.
After my not-very-near-death experience with Covid-19 earlier this year, I’ve had all manner of problems with aching legs, specifically my knees and my big left toe and I finally managed to secure a GP appointment to have it examined in person and not over the phone. I mention Covid-19 because I have decided, with almost no medical knowledge, that aching legs is due to Long Covid, because until this year I have never had knee problems at all. My toe is not a new problem, caused by ill-fitting shoes as a young boy and always wearing football boots that were two sizes too small. I was referred for a X Rays of my knee and toe and, to my astonishment, got said X Rayed (sp) within five days. The result will not be with my surgery for a week, but that’s not too bad given how busy the NHS staff are.
I reported last week how my GP did very well not to laugh out loud when I asked to see a clinical psychologist, just like Ben Stokes had when he went slightly doolally and just nodding in the affirmative when I suggested the England all rounder might have gone to see a parasitic private clinical psychologist and not been on a waiting list after all. In fact, there’s no NHS waiting list for clinical psychology: it just doesn’t exist. But when he explained the possibilities once he had seen the results of my X Rays, I was the one who was laughing out loud.
“It’s possible you may need to see a physiotherapist,” he said, again with a straight face. “But,” I quickly chimed in, “There’s a massive waiting list, right?” So massive, it turns out, I will probably have been through the oven at the local crematorium by then and maybe not in the best shape for physiotherapy. The way things are going, I’m going to die both mad and infirm. What a happy thought that is.
I’m desperate to get fitter, both physically and mentally, but the problem at the moment is I can’t walk very far without a fair degree of pain. I suggested to my GP that I might need to walk through the pain and indeed play golf through it if my aches are arthritic – my big toe certainly is – and I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d replied: “Are you fucking stupid?” Instead, he confirmed that conditions like arthritis don’t normally just go away and it might be a question of walking and playing golf through the pain or just sitting on my arse waiting to die.
Returning to my car after the X Ray, I felt my hip twinge like it had never twinged before. Christ: another bloody ache and pain and this time in a place you simply cannot ignore. This never happened when I were a lad, or even a middle aged bloke, but as I make the hopefully slow but inevitable journey through infirmity to certain death, I am more aware of my mortality than ever before.
So next week, I shall probably get some kind of diagnosis for my aches and pains, along with suggestions to take even more drugs because, as with my mental health, there’s fuck all else they can do. Basically, we can’t cure you, but we can put some sticking plaster on, in the form of even more drugs. I’m think my next rattle will be my death rattle.
