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Back to the village for my actual appointment, which turned out just to be a meeting with the pharmacist to see how my medication is going (I have very slightly high blood pressure, but so would you if you were moving house and hadn't sold your previous house yet). I'd had no bad side effects on the previous medication, but it hadn't really brought my blood pressure down much, so he suggested doubling the dose. I know from Ferrero Rochers how dangerous just doubling stuff can be.
But when I asked if I could pick up the stuff straight away he said it had to be signed off by a doctor so they'd text me when it was ready. Which means another trip and that it would probably have been quicker to wait til next week and get an appointment with the doctor.
I also showed him the cut on my hand which has got a bit red and sore and he agreed that that should be seen by a doctor, but he wasn't a doctor, so I had to make another appointment and a doctor couldn't see me until Tuesday. My hand will either have got better on its own or fallen off by then.
I hoped I'd get the results of my blood test today too, which I did, but again the pharmacist could only show me and I don't get to see a doctor about that until November. Though if my hand gets better can I go in on Tuesday and have a chat about the blood results? There are signs up saying that you're only allowed to discuss one problem at each appointment (what if the problems are connected though? And surely it's more efficient to sort out two things in ten minutes than have me come in again). It hardly needs saying, but I will say if for future historians, the NHS is fucked. My sore hand will probably not kill me and my high blood pressure is only a mild cause for concern, but for others that kind of delay might prove serious or fatal and to be honest I'm annoyed that I have to spend the weekend with unpleasant hand pain.
I am less annoyed with the NHS (to whom I owe a great deal) than with myself and my own stupidity. Who would have thought that broken bowl I joked about on moving day would bite me from the bin when I tried to push more stuff on top of it or that that injury would then plague me for a couple of weeks. It's a bit like a very lame version of the because of a nail the horseshoe was lost and I am worried that it might end up with me buried under a car park in Leicester.
I think about this quite often, but the thing or person that will eventually kill you is out there is some form. You probably don't know that the thing will one day kill you (I never thought that that nice bowl that I bought in Habitat at the turn of the Millennium would come to get me), but it's out there, perhaps manufactured and ready to go, perhaps living already or perhaps in its constituent parts or still an egg or a sperm or whatever. Most likely the thing that will kill you is inside you already. I would never have suspected my ball of turning against me, but I am still very suspicious of my heart's ultimate motives.
I wonder what will kill me and what will kill you. Maybe the same nuclear missile. That'd be nice. Think of me as you evaporate. Knowing our luck it will be something as apparently harmless as a bowl or a step on the stairs that you've trod on every day or a tomato that you're growing in your green house that is going to choke you. We don't know the face of our assassin, only that it is waiting for us out there somewhere and the only way to defeat it is to kill yourself in another way so it doesn't get the pleasure.
