Not another rabbit!  Cat and Cat really are dreadful killers.  I know we have more rabbits than sheep on our land – a lot more – but I like them.  Watership Down it may not be, but I like them anyway. 

She asked me to talk about anger.  I did.  I said that it is a perfectly healthy emotion.  I mentioned a couple of political issues that irritate me (the NHS on the inadequate treatment of addiction and the deification of Al Gore on the issue of global warning).  Now she criticises me for my viewpoints: I’m not allowed to have them if they differ from hers. 

I don’t think she likes me. In fact I’m sure of it.  She went so far as to say that she would not judge my staff by her thoughts about me.   I suspect it all goes back to the fact that she failed to get her daughter better and had to ask for help.  

Tonight I went to two Anonymous Fellowship meetings, one after the other.  Tomorrow morning I shall go to a post-graduate meeting in a local hospital.  I know I benefited from the Fellowship meetings.  I am not confident I shall get much benefit from the medical one.

His wife refused to have sex with him for three years.  Now he has found someone else.  What did his wife expect?

He wanted me to check his heart.  I did.  There is nothing wrong with it.  All the tests are fine.  Now he wants to know what he can do about his anxiety.  I told him that I had the wrong hat on.   Doctors are not the right people to whom to ask that question.  He needs to see me when I have my counsellor hat on.

Every year I have to present a portfolio of my activities to an assessor appointed by the Independent Doctors Forum. The process is in accordance with guidelines prepared by the General Medical Council.  I have no argument with that, even though the GMC itself is rapidly becoming an offshoot of government.  Along with the British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners, they do the bidding of the Department of Health in support of the NHS, as do the Healthcare Commission and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.  But the IDF is different. These doctors are independently minded and care for patients rather than bend the knee to politically motivated committees.   I am very happy to be judged by them.

I’ve been catching up on a bit of sleep – which is fine, except that I have now got behind on my NLP reading.  Finding time for new learning is difficult when the day is already full. 

Two hours before needing to leave for the airport, she realised that she had run out of her tablets.  On my mobile I telephoned her local chemist but he didn’t know me and therefore, understandably, he insisted that I had to fax a prescription to him.  This would have been easy if I had been in my medical practice in London but I wasn’t:  I was about to start a group therapy session in Kent.  Twenty four people had to wait while I attended to the needs of one thoughtless individual.

“I had a wobble”, he said.

I fear he has had a stroke.

“Treatment in PROMIS is so intense – not like the other centres I’ve been in”.

No, maybe not – and I’ll tell you why not.