This Is For You, Doc.

PATIENTS sometimes arrive at their appointment bearing something they have brought for the GP. Most often, it is something expected, like a sample for testing. On occasion, someone grateful for their treatment or who is simply being kind, comes with a gift – tomatoes from their garden, or a book they have finished and thought you might like to read. It’s lovely.

I had one lady who went to Blackpool with her husband every year for their holiday. She always returned with a present for me. One year, it was a shiny model of the tower; another time, a toy seagull that flew around the ceiling light on a string. Trinkets, and very kind of her.

One keen fisherman used to bring me a trout sometimes. He had frozen it on the day it was caught and kept it for me until his next appointment. “Put it straight in the freezer, Doc, until you go home”. Fortunately, there was a small ice box in the staff room fridge. The same man once turned up early on a summer evening, when I was doing an on-call shift at the local Out-of-Hours centre. This time, he brought a beautiful, fresh seatrout. He left it at reception while I was busy with a patient, having dropped in on his way home from a fishing expedition. With no fridge, let alone a freezer at the OOH centre, all I could think of was to put it in a sink of cold water until I finished my shift. However, when midnight came and it was time to go home, I forgot about the fish. The next day, the health centre administrator phoned me. ‘Dr Edmunds, did you forget something last night when you went home?’ I was slow to cotton on, and she played with me, dropping hints like ‘something very smelly’ and ‘not what the cleaner wanted to find in a consulting room sink.’ Oops. The water had been tepid at best when it left the cold tap, and the fish would have gradually warmed up over a summer night.