Trying on a pair of trousers the other day, and craning my neck to try and get a rear view of myself in the bedroom mirror, I saw a dark something in the middle of my back that I didn't think had been there the last time I looked (which isn't very often). After I'd digested the information I thought that I'd better follow the medical advice to get any change in the appearance of a mole checked out by my GP. It turned out that the soonest I could get an appointment with the only GP at the practice I actually like was ten days, or sixteen days for another that I'd met once and didn't much take to. I could see the locum in only forty-eight hours, so on the basis that his or her lack of popularity probably reflected deep-seated conservatism on the part of most patients rather than any medical deficiencies, and the fact that the first of the other two dates fell on my birthday and the second during our holiday, I settled for the locum.
The locum looked at my back and said that the moles were fine, but there was an outsize blocked pore that he could deal with if I liked. He did, and professed himself pleased with the result, saying I was the first person he'd cured all morning. He commented that dark skinned people like me were relatively unlikely to contract melanoma, which mainly afflicted redheads, but agreed it was sensible to get moles checked when in doubt, and that it is hard to see the middle of your own back. I have known two people with melanoma, though they were both redheads, and one of them died of it, so I am more hawkish about it than I might be otherwise.
When the Archers scriptwriters decided that Siobhan's adulterous behaviour was punishable by death and gave her malignant melanoma, she said that not having a partner to look at her back she had been late in picking it up. It may be that new lovers observe each other's bodies with that level of detail, despite middle age, but in my experience by the time you are embarking on your fourth decade with your life's partner, you have both begun to develop the art of glossing over physical defects. Minute inspection of each new emerging blemish would just be too demoralising. I was looking at my legs in the mirror recently, and discovered that my knees had gone baggy. I mean, when the hell did that happen?
After the doctor came the dentist, booked in a fit of panic because I hadn't been for a long time, and the surgery reserves the right to chuck you off the NHS list if you don't go for regular check-ups. The dentist said that my the teeth were fine, with no fillings needed, and that it was marvellous that I had so few. I have four or five, all except one dating from before I left school, a legacy of 1970s drill and fill dentistry. My current dentist took a charitable view, saying that in those days that was how things were done, with more precautionary fillings. I thought it probably reflected the fact that if you pay dentists according to how many fillings they do, they have an incentive to drill holes in children's teeth. When I hear from the pro-Statin lobby, funded partly by Stain manufacturers, about the population health benefits of giving Statins to all over 50s on a precautionary basis, I need only look in my own mouth to be reminded of the other side of the argument.
Alas, although I didn't need fillings I did need a good scrub. In the past the dentist has done the scraping and polishing, and I have regarded it as the reward for undergoing all that probing with an alarming pointed tool, but this time she told me I needed an appointment with the hygienist. I can see that it doesn't make sense for NHS dentists with their umpteen years of training to be doing work that could be carried out by hygienists, but it means I have to make an extra visit, so that's another half a morning gone, not to mention an additional £38.50.
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