I opened my eyes. he clock said 5.45 am or thereabouts – I wasn’t too switched on at that point. The alarm was set for 6.00 am so I lay and watched the time count down and then switched it off before it leapt into action. Being deaf I have an alarm which operates a shaker under the mattress, but I felt I could do without that. I stumbled around the bathroom for a while then went into the kitchen to brew tea and to get two Belvita Chocolate Chip cookies for my breakfast. My OH also stumbled into life soon after and went through the same processes except that she forswore breakfast as we had an hour’s journey ahead of us.
By 8.10 am we were more or less ready for the taxi to call. The taxi driver put my three wheeler into the capacious boot of his Skoda Octavia and off we went. There had been a hard frost overnight so that, although the road was not icy, being dry, the fields all around were white. At the hospital we made our way through that great entrance hall – a modern NHS (Scotland) cathedral – a testing walk in itself, and then set off up the corridor to find ‘Bay 2’ There, fortunately we were able to have a few minutes peace and quiet as we waited which allowed our hearts and breathing to catch up.
Soon a voice called out my OH’s name and we set off again to the room where the Doctor was waiting for us. After a deal of chatting the Doctor carried out her examination, announced that she would take a biopsy, did so, and we were on our way out again. A brief pause in the Cafe for some pill taking and then back to the waiting taxi and so home.
However, this was not the end of our jobs for the day. Yesterday my OH provided a sample to go to our local Health Centre where it would be sent off for examination. We took it down there only to find that the Health Centre was closed – which, on a Monday, is unusual. There was a notice on the door about public holidays, but when we got back home and consulted our calendars and diaries no such public holiday could be found. It therefore fell to the writer of this blog do do some web searching. It turns out that NHS employees are entitled to a certain number of holidays during the year, the dates of which are to be decided locally. And – you’ve guessed it – Monday, 16th October was one of them. So, once we had returned fro the DGRI and turned our selves around we were off to the Health Centre to deliver this specimen and to find out whether it might be too late and that another one would need to be taken.
We comforted ourselves by going to Scran-tastic and getting something for lunch.
