Enjoying bad health

Lucy’s column for October 21st
Doclo..1
Years ago, my mother once said of a neighbour who was a permanent fixture in the local doctor’s surgery queue : "She enjoys bad health…".In other words, she was a hypochondriac. This was the section of society which my old mum treated with total contempt, since she was one of those stoics who, in the 46 years I knew her, never went into hospital, and succumbed in her latter years only to an under-active thyroid which meant taking a tablet a day – which she loathed and detested doing, treating it as a weakness, rather than a life-saver.
Indeed, on the day she died, in her 81st year, she woke up feeling "a bit iffy", went downstairs and rang the doctor, went back to bed to await his arrival, and shuffled off her mortal coil as calmly and uncomplainingly as she had lived her life, just a couple of hours later.
So this "can’t bother that busy doctor – mustn’t be a drain on the NHS", attitude must have rubbed off on me, because I really have to gird my loins before I pick up a phone and ask for appointments. I don’t suffer from what’s known as the white coat syndrome so far as I know. I like to think I have a fairly good relationship with the young man who’s been monitoring my fairly hum-drum and boringly normal blood pressure for the past 20 years. I tend to limit my visits to perhaps two a year. But when I go, I certainly go, with a list, and the question : "Shall we start with my head, and work downwards, or the other way around?"
That doesn’t mean to say I’m a paragon of virtuous good health. In fact, most days I feel like rubbish, and my one gleeful thought of the day is actually waking up – alive and kicking. So far, I’ve been in hospital for the birth of one of my two babies – I had the second at home – wisdom teeth extraction, varicose veins – which came back with a vengeance just a few years later, and are still there – and the dreaded breast cancer lumpectomy. I can’t really count the cataracts. It only took about 20 minutes and I didn’t even have to take so much as my shoes off.
But despite my reluctance to cave in to what is known in medical circles as "the fat file" – the aforementioned hypochondria – I’m in the hospital appointments, and repeat prescriptions, loop. I have a yearly blood-letting date. And an annual mammogram at the Breast Clinic. And yes, the Statins are washed down with the nightly cocoa. I’m a martyr to a hideous corn, and a "bad back". As I write, the latter has been stopped in its tracks with some over-the-counter pain killers, and a heat-emitting ugly truss thing-y, which himself found on Google, which was lying beside me, stuck to the sheets, along with a corn plaster, next morning.
Talking of feet – oh, those 50s stilettoes have a lot to answer for – he, and Google, have come up with a cheese-grater contraption heralded as The Ultimate Foot File, so gentle it won’t burst a balloon, which claims to remove callouses and dry skin, neither of which I suffer from. I’m not sure what my chiropodist June Allen will make of it. It may trap the shavings in a little egg. But nothing calms a corn like June.
Currently, I’m awaiting the results of recent visits to the jolly vampires at the DRI, and the wonderful girls at the Derby City General Breast Unit. Fingers crossed. Back aching. Corn throbbing. I hope I don’t sound smug. I so want to be like my mum.
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