"You saved my life"

Today I went to say goodbye to my doctor. I think technically it was an annual well woman appointment, but that was just the cover story. I like my doctor so much, and find him so easy to talk to, that after I'd been through breast cancer, I got him to remove three moles from my back. That was a good 20-30 minutes chat time, lying on my front on a table. If I had grown up with a health service which allows more than 10 minutes for a visit to the GP, I could probably have just made an appointment and said "I want to ask lots of things about cancer that I wasn't able to focus on at the time", but I still have a residual vaguely guilty feeling about wasting a GP's time if you're not actually dying, and so I pleaded suspicious moles instead. Two of them were normal, but one of them was pre-cancerous, which just shows that the lab technician who analysed them didn't know his or her Latin, because actually it was post-cancerous.

Anyway, I got quite mushy in the Doctor's Office. I walked in at 9.00am, and there was one person sitting in the waiting room. What's up, I wonder? Isn't anyone ill any more these days? What are they all doing with themselves? Being healthy? So I thought to myself "Oh good, he'll have time to chat", and indeed he did. I told him all about moving to Scotland, and asked about what records would be useful to copy and take. Apparently all of them (or it's easier for the medical records people to copy the lot, rather than riffle through and pick out the juicy bits). So no doubt I'll have a few box loads of paper to replace the stuff I'm daily throwing out as we sort our house contents in preparation for the move. In these electronic days, it is unbelievable the amount of paperwork that the medical world generates. I sign a form every time I go to that office to say that none of my details have changed: address, telephone number, insurer, date of birth, etc... Hang on a minute. Why is my date of birth on there? How could that possibly change?

Of course one of the tricky things about saying goodbye to a GP, is that you don't know for sure you're not going to see him again - unless you arrange to have the annual well woman appointment on the way to the airport. I feel I've rather tempted fate, by having a closure-y type conversation with him. One of the kids is absolutely bound to get an unusual virus now, aren't they? But I didn't want to just let him do the usual prodding and poking and extracting and be on my way. I wanted to say some things to him, one of which was "You saved my life". I believe that to be true - or at least I believe it to be a real possibility. Of course I won't ever know what would have happened if he'd taken the word of the mammogram radiographer on two separate occasions, and said "you got the all-clear" to me, instead of "I'd really like you to have a second opinion". And you might say he was just doing his job. But there's vigilance and there's vigilance, and I think... well, I said it anyway, and his eyes looked a bit moist at that point.