Okay, I have at best a love-hate relationship with doctors. As
sensational has said in the past, they tend to get hung up on the fact that I could stand to lose some weight to the exclusion of anything else. This usually becomes particularly acute when I move and therefore change doctors, and the new one must therefore assume nobody has ever mentioned this before.I am, luckily, generally fairly healthy. This means that I tend only to go to the doctor's once every six months or so to get a repeat prescription for my chosen contraceptive method. It's completely routine and, because I'm not actually ill, I prefer not to miss work for such an appointment. I therefore ask for an early morning appointment so I can go straight on to work afterwards.
A while back - couple of years, maybe? - the surgery with whom I am currently registered changed their appointment procedures so that it was no longer possible to book an appointment more than seven days in advance. Not surprisingly I found this less convenient, and told them so, but was fobbed off with some waffle about how it was to better implement 'Government guidelines'. (The guidelines concerned are supposed to ensure that anyone who wants one can get an appointment within 48 hours.)
This has more or less worked to date, but when I rang up the surgery this morning to make an appointment for next week, I found that they'd moved the goalposts again. Now, apparently, one cannot prebook an appointment except for the day on which you call, which means that getting an early-morning appointment will be well-nigh impossible. I can only assume that they no longer want to deal with any routine stuff at all. Well, it's worked for me; I now have an appointment with a family planning clinic closer to where I currently live, one evening this week.
I'm so looking forward to this; we can have the "Have you considered other methods of contraception?" conversation (yes, and between self and
rotwang we have two godchildren that prove the best-known alternatives don't work as well), we can have the "Isn't your blood pressure a little high?" conversation (only because you changed the protocol; it was within the limits until then. And I've signed the piece of paper which says that if I explode it's all my own fault), and now that I've turned 35 I dare say we can have the "aren't you a bit old to still be on the Pill?" conversation as well. Rowr.
