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.

the thorn beneath

I shouldn't have gloated about how nice it was to have a whole day to get on with the garden.  Today I came back from my Pilates lesson via the Colchester Walk In Centre for minor ailments, and that was the afternoon gone.  I can't complain about the time spent going to Pilates, since I choose to do it.  I like the teacher, and the exercises seem to make the difference between being a chronic back pain sufferer and living a normal active life.  At school I was unutterably hopeless at gym lessons, and throughout adulthood I have avoided most forms of organised physical exercise, but Pilates isn't too bad.  At any rate, it is preferable to the alternative.

The trip to the Walk In Centre was because yesterday as I was weeding around a rose I felt something prick me through my gloves and stab me in the left knuckles.  I thought I could see a dark speck in the centre of the (tiny) wound, suggesting that a thorn had broken off in there, but couldn't get anything to pop out when squeezed.  It isn't very easy to squeeze your knuckles (try it), especially when watched by three chickens.  During the night my hand began to hurt, but I couldn't be bothered to get up and start fiddling with it in the small hours.  I inspected the tiny wound again after my shower this morning, and still couldn't find anything there, but my knuckles had reddened and started to swell.  By lunchtime it had got visibly worse, so I thought I might as well see a member of the medical profession and start on antibiotics today, as wait for two or three days and start then after the symptoms had got really bad.  Also, the Systems Administrator said I might as well go today because otherwise I would only spend the evening worrying about it.  That was probably right, as you do hear of the very occasional unfortunate gardener who ends up losing their hand or entire arm after a tiny scratch goes septic.

The GP surgery receptionist said they were fully booked unless I was an emergency.  I thought I wasn't an emergency, but that I would like to get medical attention before I became one, so I called at the Walk In Centre on the way back from my lesson.  The parking is confusing (it's free, but that's not immediately obvious), at the point when I arrived I was the only person sitting in the waiting area, the rolling screens said that the time to be seen was running at half an hour, and I reckon that's what it took, which was no worse than a visit to the GP, who often runs half an hour late.  The nurse was pleasant and professionally reassuring and agreed with my view (so clearly I thought she was a very sensible woman) that to have worsening symptoms the day after getting a scratch was not normal and suggested there was infection.   She gave me a prescription for a week's supply of Flucloxacillin, which she said was the best antibiotic for skin.  Given that the injury was caused by a plant she didn't want to dig around to see what, if anything, was left in there, as it will dissolve in situ or find its own way out.

Reading the leaflet for the Flucloxacillin (I'm nerdy that way) the list of things it treats, besides skin, is so long that at the end of a week I doubt I'll have a bacterium left in my body.  This is not necessarily a good thing, but the main thing is that I don't want my left hand to turn into an agonising mass of infected flesh that has to be amputated, followed by the rest of my arm two days later.  The nurse warned me that the hand might look worse before it looked better, but that the sign to watch out for was if I got a red streak up the length of my arm.  That'll be A&E time.

Although I rather wish I hadn't spent the best part of 45 minutes in part of Colchester Hospital and another 20 minutes in Asda waiting for their pharmacist to put a pot of Flucloxacillin in a paper bag, the episode in no way puts me off gardening.  The girl in the pharmacy said it was a very good reason not to garden, but it's just one of those things.  Like sprains if you do sport, or sore feet if you wear fashionable shoes.  Or, I suppose, a one in four chance of death if you climb K2.  All hobbies have their hazards, and their rewards.