This morning, true to the Met Office's predictions we woke up to blue sky and sunshine. My trip round the garden to feed the animals was basked in sunshine and my attention was captured by this lovely convolvulus. It is very confused! Its label says it flowers in summer and here we are in mid-December and these look very much like flowers to me.
I thought they are the perfect foil to how I feel and look. I feel miserable still - another three hours of signing and folding has finally seen off the office Christmas cards. I wonder if anyone will notice that I spent most of the weekend doing them? Probably not. Mind you, that'd just give them the opportunity to moan about having to sign them themselves!
Luck has it that I have terrible conjunctivitis today, giving me the most unluscious of looks. My eye is very painful, bloodshot and full of gunk so I feel lucky to have seen the flower at all. Do you know what gets my goat about that? I know I have conjunctivitis, I've had it a number of times before. It is easy to self diagnose. Our government issued a list of drugs that they thought should be made available over the counter about two years ago and choloramphenicol eye drops (the recognised treatment for conjunctivitis) were on the list of suitable products to switch. Are they now available without a prescription? No they are not. Why not? Well a good guess is they are dirt cheap to produce and not worth the effort and cost of switching.
A doctor's appointment in this country is just about impossible to get - it has always been the case that you are offered an appointment 4-5 days after you phone for one. The government is getting hot under the collar about this...they hate the negative publicity that drops on the heads of the NHS so they are 'encouraging' surgeries (some would say bullying) to offer patients quicker appointments. My surgery operates this system where you can't book an appointment until 8.30am in the morning on the day you want to see a doctor, then it's a free-for-all on the phones, where you just have to press redial, redial redial until you finally get through and all the appointments have gone. How useful is that? Well to me not at all. I have to leave home for work an hour before the start of this free-for-all and by the time I arrive there it's too late.
The next opportunity is the 2pm free-for-all for the afternoon surgery. Same scenario only this time I have the added complication of being more than an hour's drive away (on a good journey) so when they say 'oh the only appointment we have is 2.20pm, I am once again stuck.
It's so frustrating when I don't need a diagnosis, just a prescription for something that costs the health service around 30 pence. Surely it's time for a rethink about this nonsense?
