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.

talks and teeth

My fourth box from Mr Fothergill arrived, and the postman handed it over remarking cheerfully 'More plants!' so he has clearly got the idea.  When I opened it I discovered I had ordered frost resistant Delosperma, or ice plants, not Gazania, and they were already in 9cm pots that should see them through the winter, so beyond standing them on the greenhouse staging I didn't need to pot them or do anything.  Frost resistant or not, I think they might as well be planted out next March and not now.

I gave a woodland conservation talk to a gardening club last night.  They are a friendly group, with thriving membership numbers, and I already knew them from a previous talk about gardening and bees, so I was fairly confident that it would be OK.  I'm due to give another talk on Monday evening to a group in Billericay, so I'll have to take my equipment and trug of twigs with me to work, plus some clean clothes and a nailbrush, and go there straight from work, having tried to make myself look roughly presentable in the loo at the plant centre.  As I'm working over the weekend as well it's going to be a bit of a marathon three days.  Then at the end of next week I've agreed to go and talk to Braintree beekeepers about gardening and bees.  When I agree to do these things, which is generally ages in advance, I think it will all be fine, and then as the hectic period approaches I begin to feel rather gloomy about it, and wonder why I get myself into such situations.  And then it's fine.

I once saw a documentary in which people surfed up the Severn bore.  The better ones stayed on the wave for ages.  Getting into the mental and emotional state where you can stand up in front of a room full of people and entertain them, and then do it again after three days of solid physical work, and then for a third time in just over a week, is probably a bit like riding the bore.  It's good to sometimes make the effort, but you couldn't do it all the time.

Once I'd got back from the talk, and unwound, it was quite late by my standards, but I had to set the alarm as I needed a haircut and the only appointment I could get was at 9.00am.  Normally I wouldn't risk Colchester's traffic at that hour, but happily it was running freely.  Then I went to Tesco, where the money off toothpaste voucher they'd sent me wouldn't work at the till.  When I reclaimed my discount at the customer service desk I discovered that the entire mailing was faulty, and nobody's toothpaste voucher would scan.  Somebody in an IT department somewhere is going to have some explaining to do.  People who look askance at my downshifted status, compared to the intellectual stimulation of their own graduate level employment, forget how much of having a proper job consists of spending your days sorting out messes of unbelievable tediousness, like having sent entire batches of non-scanning money-off vouchers to customers.

Then, proving that I know how to have a good time, I went to the dentist.  I quite like the dentist, who is a reassuring Swede who doesn't give out the disapproving vibes of some dentists.  Also I don't generally need anything doing to my teeth.  I shouldn't be smug about that particular health outcome, as doubtless genetics and lifestyle will find something else to go wrong if not my teeth.  By the time I left the parental home and the ministrations of the Devon dentist I had four fillings, and I have never required another since.  Makes you wonder about the drill and fill method of paying dentists in the 1970s, doesn't it?