emergency appointment

Whole weeks to spend in the garden never pan out that way.  At lunchtime I got a phone call from my mother, to say that my father had bad toothache and the possibility of an emergency appointment at Braintree, and if he did get an appointment could I drive him there, if I wasn't at work and had enough petrol.  As I answered the phone it was clear I wasn't at work, and he did get an appointment, and fortunately (although in a state of foresight rather than panic) I had filled the car up.  By the time the call came saying that they could fit him in, it was twenty past two, and the appointment was for four o'clock.

The Systems Administrator checked on Google maps that there were no traffic snarl ups reported, while I changed out of my gardening clothes and scrubbed the worst of the dirt from under my finger nails.  I collected my dad, who urged me to drive, drive, while forgetting to do his seatbelt up, and then had to stop at his dentist to collect his referral letter.  Happily the A12 and A120 were both running freely, or at least the A120 was running as freely as it ever does, and we made it to Braintree in quite good time.  I'd had a look at the map before setting out, and the SA had warned me that it had a one way system, adding reassuringly that it was quite small, and full of dentists.

It turned out that we were not just going to any old dental partnership, but to the Braintree Community Hospital, which should have been straightforward to get to, just go along the old main road and keep going.  Except that you can't.  It becomes a no-through road and ends in a Sainsbury's car park, which I began to remember from my trip to the Braintree and Bocking Constitutional Club, so we had to embark on the one way system, and arrived at the hospital with five minutes to spare.

Braintree Community Hospital has free car parking, and actually saw my father for his four o'clock appointment at 4.00pm.  If we'd known that on the way over it wouldn't have cheered us up, as my dad was reconciling himself to the possibility of being late with the thought that the hospital would be running behind schedule anyway.  The free parking was nice, and the water cooler in the waiting area.  The consultation was a complete non-event, as the dentist couldn't see any reason for my father's teeth to be so painful following recent treatment, which was exactly what his own dentist had said, and couldn't see any abnormality on the X-rays that my father had taken with him.  He has to go back for a follow-on appointment, still in Braintree.  Goodness knows why there isn't a suitable dental facility in Colchester.  My father refuses to take pain killers because the side effects are worse than the original pain, so all we got from our afternoon driving about was the reassurance of a second opinion that there was nothing, objectively speaking, wrong.

The medical profession is very bad at pain.  Diagnosing the causes, treating the symptoms, or even acknowledging that it exists.  I have sat opposite a doctor and told him that something hurt, only to be told that it was not supposed to hurt, which wasn't really the point.  My subjective experience was that it did hurt, so what the textbooks said was supposed to happen didn't help.  It is very peculiar, given that pain is one of the things that matters a lot to patients.  Most doctors would much rather be dealing with something they can see and measure on a scan or blood test, and take action to correct, than an unobservable thing happening inside somebody else's head, which they don't understand and often can't do anything about.