When to avoid the doctors

Joanna Gray - 28 Mar 17

Our doctor avoidance began when my ten-month-old son and I caught the norovirus in a surgery waiting room. Why we were there I cannot remember, a cough perhaps, a cold. We arrived healthy and left unknowingly incubating the plague. The only upside was my finally shifting that last half a stone of baby pudge.

Two more children, a good stone, and ten years later, the doctors’ waiting room and my family have only a glancing relationship. I generally look away. I will enter the plague pit for smears and vaccinations and then leg it outside for large gulps of fresh air. Symptoms have to be severe, sustained and causing actual damage to the children for us to brave the surgery’s viral fug.

On the whole, this approach as worked. The three boys are in robust health with only a few scars as reminders of their rough and tumble childhood. My general rule of thumb is: “Is it getting better?” or “How many weeks as it been around?” When it’s entering double figures I will give the doctor a ring. And yes perhaps there have been instances when an earlier visit might have been useful

“Sixteen weeks you say?”
“Well I didn’t want to bother you with a cough.”
“We usually suggest visiting after three weeks.”
“Is that all?”
“It’s a savage chest infection.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll prescribe antibiotics and steroids. He might need a chest Xray.”
Happily in this instance it was my husband who was the neglected party.

Sadly it was number one son who suffered an attack of boils after my reluctance to take his “spot” seriously. We’d had a family holiday when the “spot” arrived. I said confidently, “It’s just an infected mosquito bite, don’t pick it.” Well it turns out the boil virus lives in the nose so asking a nine-year-old boy to stop picking is like asking President Erdogan to stop going on about Turkey. He alternately picked his nose, scratched his mosquito bites and lo the boils began erupting – in his ear, on his neck and then on his nipple. It was only when the nipple boil exploded at school leaving his white shirt splatted with red blood and yellow pus that I thought the doctors might be looming. When his teacher said, “He can’t really enter the borough swimming gala with those open wounds,” we finally trudged to the surgery. Two courses of antibiotics and antibiotic cream later, there are now only the faintest of scars left – and a dread of mosquitos. The whole episode has had no impact on his vigorous nose picking.

When a “spot” on our middle son started peeling, spreading raw redness over his shoulder, I covered it in Vaseline and hoped for the best. Until it crept down his arm and up his neck. “Oh,” I found myself saying to the doctor, “I’d thought impetigo was a veterinary complaint.” It also explained the angry, kissing-acquired patch of scarlet that had been growing on my chin.

Sometimes doctor avoidance is not entirely without its merits. We’ve got through chicken pox, swine flu and concussion without troubling the NHS. Last month our one-year-old trapped his willy trying to escape from a highchair. At bath time the foreskin had swollen to a large penny sized blister – it looked not dissimilar to an inflated water balloon. My husband almost fainted. My bag was packed and I was braced for a night in A&E…and yet…the baby was so tired and needed a good sleep. So I slavered his willy in antibiotic cream and in the morning the swelling had reduced. A week later it was entirely back to normal. Quite how, “I think I’ve trapped my willy in a highchair” has now entered my husband’s seduction lines is beyond me.

Joanna Gray

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