... Humour may not be a cure, but it sure can be a powerful placebo or analgesic. Be well, People. LOL K xx

DIAGNOSTICS


My worst nightmare: that the doctor would be either too young OR too attractive. He was both. Far too young to be preoccupied with lopping breasts off middle-aged women; and surely his artistic, sensitive hands would be better engaged in more delicate pursuits?

My worst fear realised: malignancy. After the maelstrom rush of strategic clinical approach and prognosis, the discussion turned in a bizarre twist to the causal factors of all illness. “When a patient walks through the door”, he said, “the first thing for a medic to ascertain is whether s/he is mad, bad, sad or sick…”

How odd that it is this part of the interview that I remember so clearly – probably because of the veracity of his words. The sound of his voice I felt I could swallow, following as it worked its comforting way back to its root, deep at the base of his navel. His tongue seemed to debate with his teeth as he turned his ideas over, like pages, in his mind. I reflected on the nature of my unhealed emotional wounds, doubtless sadly festering and releasing their toxins right now into the length of all my bones and marrow. I had to get it across my dulled cerebral cortex that I was actually seriously not well in spite of my feelings of rude good health.

“Mental attitude is critical when it comes to beating off the disease”. The beautiful, youthful consultant gathered together my papers on his desk and smiled knowingly as he summed me up. “Yes”, I thought. “Indeed it is”. I was considering the need to appear before him with some other inexplicable and phantom malaise or rise in temperature in just a few days’ time. Funny how that suddenly made me feel so much better…