Not a Happy Day

Child Protection again…I’m not sure I can do this teaching lark when such horrible things can happen.

Anyway I was fairly down when I was in the Supermarket buying the Yellow Dart donuts and I get tapped on the shoulder. I turn around; there’s no one there. And I just know who it is; Spikey in year ten greets me at the beginning of every lesson like that and somehow he was surprised when I greeted him by name. Sensible lad doesn’t want to be a shelf stacker (and is pissed off that Sainsburys is getting work out of him for free!)

So that cheered me up…and then I went to the doctors…

Now I like doctors. (Hate psychiatrists and counsellors but thats another matter) I like doctors, and hospitals come to that. I was ill a lot when I was a kid and they made me feel better, so I like them, fairly simple. This doctor I particularly like, he’s fairly cool so I was almost looking forward to seeing him. Hah! That got shot out of the water fairly fast.

It started with the Betnovate, it always does. Betnovate is a fairly powerful steroid cream. I use it about once every two days and I have done for…ooh…about fourteen years. This seems to really piss some doctors off as though I was doing something deliberately dangerous to myself for no good reason. Steroid creams have all sorts of nasty side effects, none of which I have, however doctors generally assume I must be unaware of them. How else have I ended up taking betnovate for so many years?

Umm….because it works.

My skin no longer lands me in hospital, which is nice. My skin no longer tells me I can’t wear certain types of clothing. Which is nice. My skin is no longer a mass of huge red cracking sores. Which is nice.

And strangely enough, as I tried to tell the doctor, I know that steroids are crappy, I know that they can have all sorts of terrible side effects but everytime doctors try to move me onto the next sort of ointment down my skin goes back to being hellish.

But no, the doctor had to assume I’m a dizzy girl who knows nothing and thought it was a great idea, whilst I was crying, to tell me that steroids would kill me. (Notice that, he cited it as the definate article to a girl who’s crying, how is that sensible?) Ok Doctor. For one thing you’d know if they were going to kill me because there are symptoms pre sudden death and for another why do you bring this up just as I’m leaving the country? What is the helpfulness in this? I don’t believe he even looked at my notes which would have told him all the times that the various doctors have tried me on other things and what horibleness that has caused me.

What was the point?

2 thoughts on “Not a Happy Day

  1. Ah Mish, I wondered why you seemed a bit stressed earlier, I assume you were rushing off somewhere too.
    If you need a hug and someone to talk to, without the analytical mind of a psychiatrist, just gimme a shout, I’ll listen.

  2. The problem is Mish (as if you didn’t already know) that doctors – like certain other categories of people e.g. academic administrators – are dedicated followers of fashion. As such their patients have to do what is fashionable, independent of what results they report! (Ok, maybe that is too cynical but it is a plaintive wail I hear from friends with chronic conditions of various kinds).

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