I was thinking of going to see my doctor and, like you do, I was having entire conversations with him in my head. Because when I go to see him, he'll ask me about my weight (up) after he spent 6 months helping me to lose 3 stone.
Well, you see, I was doing fine and then my life went a bit pear shaped. Last May my 46 year old, disruptive, schizophrenic, paranoid, psychotic, chain smoking, alcoholic brother ran out of medication on the Friday of a bank holiday. On phoning the GP surgery, the practice manager told him his prescription would not be ready til the following Tuesday. Because even if you have been a patient at this practice for 40 years and clearly have significant mental health needs, a bank holiday is a bank holiday. If we started making exceptions for sick people, who could say where it would all end?
While my 83 year old mother battled with the kafka-esque monolith that passes for a mental health serice in our town in an effort to track down some-one with sufficient authority to tell the power crazed bitch at the surgery to pull the stick out of uptight arse and sort out the prescription, my brother worked his way down a bottle of brandy. Running out of cigarettes, he called a cab and went downtown to get more from his usual illegal, but cheap, tobacco supplier. When he got there he realised he had forgotten his wallet, could not pay the cab driver and to top it all, the shop was closed. It being a bank holiday. And 11.30pm at night. On the wrong side of a bottle of brandy and without his normal dose of pharmaceutical cosh, he decided enough was enough and threw himself off the towns picturesque victorian railway bridge.
He was in intensive care for 6 weeks. He bashed his head, broke both ankles, both legs in several places, his pelvis and several ribs. He finally got out of hospital last month and is back home with Mum.
Til next time.
