Confessions of a GP - Benjamin Daniels [56]
Other body fluids that have been brought to my surgery include:
A condom full of semen – the patient was worried that it was a funny colour.
Various samples of vaginal discharge on tampons and one miscarriage wrapped up in a tissue.
Lots of poo. One woman brought in a week’s worth of her baby’s soiled nappies. Each was neatly labelled with a time and date and she lay them out on my surgery floor in chronological order. ‘As you can see, Dr Daniels, last Thursday morning is considerably more yellow and viscous in consistency than Saturday afternoon’s.’ I spend a lot of time convincing first-time mums it is normal for baby poo to be a bright mustard-yellow colour.
My only true body fluid aversion is sputum. I just can’t bear the stuff. Every time I view sputum, I get a flashback to a particularly long ward round in which I was involved as a medical student. I was extremely hung over and after several hours of traipsing around hot and smelly wards, we finally got to our last patient, who I will call Mr Phlegming. He was an old guy with emphysema (knackered lungs from smoking) and spent his days coughing up gallons of sputum and collecting it to show us on the ward round. As we arrived, Mr Phlegming enthusiastically held out a plastic cup full to the brim with sputum. It had a plastic lid on it and clearly none of us including the consultant was particularly keen to examine its contents. Medics are a hierarchical lot and the pot got handed down from consultant to registrar, to senior house officer to house officer and then finally to me. As the medical student, I was clearly at the bottom of the food chain and as I held the cup in my hand it felt unfeasibly heavy. ‘Come along, take a look,’ my consultant barked impatiently. Opening the lid, I was greeted with a swirling mass of muck. Not quite green and not quite brown. Not quite liquid and not quite solid. It had a colour and physical state all of its own. I began to feel my stomach gurgle and then made my excuses, just reaching the toilet before spewing. Give me shit, piss, blood and vomit any day.
Racism
I’m meeting George for the first time. Everyone tells me how great he is. ‘Good old George. He really is the salt of the earth. A retired docker. Always has a smile on his face. Brings us a tin of chocolates every Christmas. Everyone loves George.’ After ten minutes with George I can’t help but agree that he’s a nice old boy. He’s in his late seventies and, apart from a bad hip, he is basically fit and well. Cheery and friendly, we have a bit of a chat about the misfortunes of the local football team and he reminisces briefly about the good old days. After a bit of a look at his hip, I suggest that he might want to consider seeing the orthopaedic doctor as he could benefit from a hip replacement. ‘Well, if you think it might help, Doc…One thing, though, I won’t see no Paki doctor, will I?’
I hate it when this happens. You meet someone you think is nice enough and they turn out to be a raging bigot. It’s so much easier to hate racists when they fulfil my expectation of being all-round arseholes. What do I do now? Do I confront a man in his late seventies about his life-long racist beliefs and try to re-educate him? Perhaps I could accidentally forget to make the referral? Some might argue that as patients are now encouraged to have ‘choice’ over which consultant they see, I should follow his request and find him the white British surgeon he wants. Remember it’s not my job to judge, simply to treat and serve my patients to the best of my abilities.
‘Some of my best friends are Asian doctors and they are also very good at their jobs,’ I say firmly. ‘If you want the referral to be made,