order. This is to be expected. You can be guaranteed that whatever the topic you talk about on the Internet, you will receive replies that vary from compassionate to stone cold. It is the way of things. It’s just important not to take either to heart, and to sift out the actual practical advice from the sarcasm or overblown sentimentality.
And the practical advice I’m getting – whether it be in the gushing response from Trixie1986 or the ‘hilarious’ reply I received from MrBigTrousers telling me I’ve probably got Ebola – is that I need to get off the bloody Internet and go to see a doctor.
I chew a fingernail as I read down through the replies, all saying more or less the same thing.
I’m not happy about it, not happy at all.
I know that I have to go and see a proper doctor, and that Dr Google is not the way forward, but I was really hoping somebody on here might at least give me a hint of what I have wrong with me. You know, something along the lines of: Oh yeah! I had all of those symptoms a couple of years ago! Turns out I had Bob Bobbins syndrome. The doctor put me on antibiotics for a month and it cleared up, no problem!
That would have stopped me feeling quite so panicky. Nobody wants to suffer from Bob Bobbins syndrome, but if you can solve it with the right pills, then it’s not really much of an issue.
The key thing is, at least I would have known that I didn’t have anything that serious. At least I wouldn’t still be thinking I was about to drop dead at any moment.
But nobody has told me I have Bob Bobbins syndrome, and in fact, nobody has really tried to guess what I might have wrong with me at all. This cannot be good.
If nobody on this forum wants to venture a guess, then it means it’s probably something rare and awful. Nob Nobbins syndrome, for instance – which kills you in a week, but not before your eyeballs start bleeding and your bum falls off.
I compose a short thank you to those who have responded to me on HealthSpace, and surf on over to the newly created digital appointment platform that my doctor’s surgery instituted a few months ago. Much fuss was made of this wonderful, new, convenient way to book a doctor’s appointment. The local Facebook page has an entire thread dedicated to it.
It’s been terrible, needless to say.
Public service websites are invariably terrible in the UK. It’s just the way things are.
I have a feeling that the day you can seamlessly communicate with any government or public service organisation of your choice via the Internet, will be the day before artificial intelligence finally takes over and murders everyone.
I cross my fingers and attempt to book an emergency appointment with my doctor for tomorrow morning. When the entire web page freezes and boots me out of the submission form, I sigh deeply and reload it to have another go.
This time it tells me that the next available emergency appointment I can book will be on Thursday, 19 September 2097.
I fear that this may be a tad too late to help me, so I reload the page again, and have one more attempt.
Hallelujah!
This time around I successfully manage to book the appointment, not for the distant future after the machines have taken over the planet, but for Thursday morning at 8.30 – a mere two days away. This still doesn’t really constitute an emergency appointment, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth here. There’s every chance that if I reload the submission form and try again, I might not get another appointment until four days after the earth has been consumed by the sun going supernova.
Thursday will just have to do.
And I will just have to cope until then.
This shouldn’t be too hard. As long as I can stop myself from obsessively looking up my symptoms on the Internet, I should be fine.
By the time Thursday morning rolls around, I am a complete wreck.
In the past two nights I think I’ve had about three hours of decent sleep. The rest of my time in bed has been spent tossing and turning. Snoregasbord tells me that I’ve been less restful in my bed than a vampire with a clove of garlic shoved up his arse.
I’ve also come to the clear and precise conclusion that I have