Nurse, The Screens Please
The nurse told me her name was Angela and she seemed very keen to get my home phone number before we went any further.
"Just in case we get cut off, " she explained.
I had been patched through to the NHS 24 helpline after calling our own G.P.s surgery. The youngest Zedette's toe was looking no better and I kept remembering the words of that pharmacist in Balloch yesterday.
"Don't hestitate to call a doctor if you're worried," she had said.
It took me a few minutes to explain the symptoms to Angela who carefully repeated everything I was saying to her. Stupidly I couldn't remember if it was the left toe or the right toe and by this time the Zedettes were downstairs playing Fifa 06 on the Playstation 2.
"Does he have a fever?" Angela asked.
"No, he's cheerfully playing football at the moment."
"Football? With a sore toe?"
"Oh...it's a computer game."
"I see."
I'm always like this with doctors and nurses. I live in fear of being branded a time-waster. On the other hand, you don't want to down-play the issue in case it's serious. Angela was looking through her notes and I sensed she was coming to some kind of a conclusion. But then there was a stange burring on the line and the phone went dead.
I replaced the receiver at my end. Twenty seconds later the phone rang and Angela was back.
"Just as well you took my home number, " I said.
"Well this kind of thing happens from time to time."
Anyway, the toe did not count as an emergency and Angela gave me some advice about applying a dressing. I thanked her and went downstairs. The FIFA game was in it's dying minutes and Scotland were beating Brazil six-nil. Mrs Z. handed me a paint roller and reminded me I'd agreed to give the hall a coat of emulsion. Apparently you can't refuse such requests on Mother's Day. Besides, she wanted to get on with the next part of her ECDL computer course. Did I tell you she got 94% in her first exam. Only another six to sit.
In the afternoon I took the Zedettes to the cinema at Clydebank. We saw The Shaggy Dog, a Disney Film starring Tim Allen. A typical American guilt-trip film in which the workaholic Dad realises he needs to spend more time with his wife and kids .... oh, and a sub-plot about him being transformed into a sheepdog after he is bitten by another sheepdog that has been stolen from a Tibetan monastery by evil research scientists. The kind of thing that happens to me all the time, but I tend not to tell you about it in this diary ... not when I can tell you about how I sat at home watching paint dry.
