Typical! Just when I finally get her a doctor’s appointment, she rises from the dead
Jem Clarke is just in his mid-fifties, is five foot zero and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…
Is it wrong to mind that Mother has become healthier?
This is not me griping about an inheritance grab of grubby chandeliers and asbestos-roofed outhouses.
My mind just boggles at the number of ducks I had to get in a row to get her a doctor’s appointment.
When she woke up, declaring she is ‘better now’, after five days of deathbed-level lethargy, I disbelieved her. Then I checked her health stats with all the home versions of self-testing Boots could offer.
She’s correct: her blood pressure, oxygen in blood, pulse, heart health, kidney and liver are all suddenly giving me top stats.
I unstrap her from plastic apparatus that looks like Fisher Price’s My First Everything I Could Steal out of the Back of an Ambulance toy set.
I scratch my chin over what to do with the doctor’s appointment: ‘He hasn’t seen you for a while – maybe he should see you,’ I say.
‘Oh, I’ll send him a damned photograph,’ Mother says.
‘You can actually do that now,’ Father says. ‘In the Australian Outback, a doctor asked a man to photograph his penile rash. And he diagnosed it there and then from a photo on an email, saving on embarrassment and air miles.’
‘Well, what should I photograph and send?’ said Mother. ‘You can’t photograph “wellness”. Could he not just take our word that we don’t want his blasted appointment?’
‘He’s not asking you to photograph anything,’ I said. ‘I’m asking you to consider asking him to consider seeing you in three dimensions. He may be able to get a better idea of your health if he sees you “in the round”.’
‘In the very round!’ said Father.
‘Oh, so says the skeleton,’ Mother says. ‘Once that hernia pops, we’ll be able to bury you in an empty Pringles tube.’
‘Stop body-shaming each other!’ I pleaded. ‘Unless you go in demanding free Ozempic, you’ve got a golden ticket. Soaring BMI – and the wheelchair means they can’t tell you to “float the fat away” in the leisure-centre pool.’
‘I don’t want a fat jab!’
‘You won’t get one. But it’s a Trojan horse – something to dangle before the doctor. Then, if he looks at you and thinks you’re OK for an 88-year-old, we can all relax, and look forward to a scone-and-statin supper with no health anxieties.’
I was right. The GP refused Ozempic, but added, ‘How else can I help you today?’
I asked, ‘Could you just do a general MOT? On the woman, not the chair.’
Amazingly, the doctor breezily dismissed a previous suggestion of dementia.
I cried out, ‘Mother! You’re not mad, after all!’
Mother sighed. ‘I told you I wasn’t. You’re the one who’s mad.’
‘Me? Me? I’m not demented … I’m not!’
‘He told me to send you nude photos,’ she said to the doctor.
I said, ‘Now tell me that that doesn’t sound like what a mad person would say. She toasted some cornflakes the other day in a toaster.’
She shot straight back, ‘He fell asleep in a bath reading comics. His father had to break the crust of congealed Beanos to pull him to safety.’
‘That was decades ago.’ I caught the eye of the nearest nurse. ‘I was 21! She fell asleep last Thursday in the middle of Emmerdale, woke up and thought she was watching Countryfile.’
‘Matt Barker looks like a Sugden from the back!’ she roared.
After five seconds of silence, the awkwardness was broken by the doctor. ‘Should we say I’ll see you in six months unless things change?’
‘Oh, nothing ever changes,’ Father said.
