by James Birk
Chapter 20
I could feel my heart pounding as I ran. I was moving at a breath-taking pace, far faster than in a normal training session. I felt almost nauseous as I saw the ground disappearing under my thundering feet. Every molecule in my body was urging me to slow down, but with a steely resolve I kept going. I couldn’t stop now, not when I was so close to my target.
Suddenly the finish loomed into sight, and with a renewed energy I sprinted even harder for the last hundred metres. As I reached my destination I lurched to a sudden halt and I glanced at the digital clock on my mobile phone.
Three minutes past five.
Not quite good enough, but an improvement on last time.
I walked into the waiting room and up to the reception desk.
The receptionist glared at me angrily.
‘Yes?’ she enquired menacingly.
‘Yes, I’m here for a five o’clock appointment with Dr Dinesh.’ I gasped.
She looked meaningfully at the clock as a way of reprimanding me for my tardiness.
‘Take a seat please,’ she snarled.
I walked sheepishly into the waiting room, picked up a three year old copy of Women’s Weekly and, after briefly surveying the room, I selected a seat between the two least contagious looking people.
I hated going to see my GP. There were so many different elements not to like. I hated the fact that you were required to be punctual, that even being tardy by a few minutes would result in being treated as though you were the lowest form of life imaginable by the permanently embittered receptionist. I could understand the argument that lateness had an impact on overall patient care, that by being late, I might be depriving someone else of an opportunity to see their GP, and I would be fine with this argument were it not for the fact that, regardless of whether I was on time or not, I always had to wait approximately forty minutes before I could actually see my doctor.
A forty-minute wait for a scheduled service would be bad enough somewhere like a train station, but in a GP practice it seemed infinitely worse because I had to do all that waiting among sick people. This would have been bad enough if I actually had been ill myself, but in cases such as this when I was in perfect health, I couldn’t help but feel it would have been more appropriate if there was a separate germ free waiting area available.
The surgery was particularly grim. When I was growing up, my local surgery was a pristine newly built state of the art clinic, with friendly staff and real community feel. The doctors knew my parents by name, and at least one of them was on the parent-teacher association of my primary school. Whenever I was ill as a child they would make sympathetic noises and I would always leave the surgery with a sticker and sometimes a lollipop.
Since I had moved to Cardiff, which admittedly had a significantly higher population than my home town, I had noticed a dip in the patient care that I received. There was a faint musty smell in the waiting room, which was decorated in rather garish patterned wallpaper, presumably the height of nineteen seventies’ interior design when it was put up, but now rotting and peeling. The seats were uncomfortable, too close together, and there were clearly too few of them; shortly after my arrival, the cramped waiting room was standing room only.
Fortunately I was rarely ill, so my visits were few and far between. Indeed since I started running and going to the gym, I hadn’t had needed to see a doctor at all.
Until now. But this visit was different. I wasn’t here to see the doctor because of any ailments, I was here because I had finally got round to thinking about my trip to Paris, and upon rereading my marathon entry form I had noticed something significant in the small print.
Law n° 99-223 on protecting the health of sportsmen and on preventing the consumption of illicit drugs was passed by the French National Assembly on March 23, 1999. Under the provisions of this new law, all French or non-French runners are required to produce proof of their fitness to participate in running competitions. Such proof must be in the form of a medical certificate issued by a doctor following a medical examination
I needed my doctor to confirm that I was medically fit enough to run a marathon. I was slightly concerned about this because it was abundantly clear that I wasn’t even remotely close to being fit enough yet, but I wasn’t sure if that meant that I was medically unfit.
The loud speaker buzzed into life above my head.
‘Christopher Parker to see Dr Dinesh. Christopher Parker, Dr Dinesh.’
I sprang out of my seat and made my way to the correct room.
Dr Dinesh was another reason I hated coming to this surgery. Not because he was a bad GP. I had no reason to think him any worse than any other GP and I had only ever found him to be highly professional and competent. No, I hated seeing Dr Dinesh, because he was friendly, charming, manifestly much better looking than me, and most irritatingly of all, clearly around the same age as me. It just didn’t seem right that my GP highlighted my own failings so acutely.
‘Hello, Mr Parker, how are you today?’ asked Dr Dinesh.
‘I’m very well actually,’ I replied, much to his confusion I’m sure, as presumably it’s not a response he had very often.
‘And what can I do for you?’ he said, still with a reassuring smile on his face.
I explained the situation. He nodded, as if this were a request he had come across in the past, and I suppose, if I thought about it, statistically I couldn’t be the first Cardiff resident to enter the Paris marathon. It was a big event after all, and with the London marathon being so hard to get into, it had to be a lot of people’s reserve choice.
He instructed me to lift up my t-shirt and he listened to my chest me with a stethoscope briefly before concluding that there was no medical reason why I shouldn’t be able to participate.
‘But I must ask Mr Parker,’ he continued, ‘have you been training, because running a marathon is a very difficult feat.’
I reassured him that I had been training fairly regularly.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I will write you a certificate of health. You can collect it from reception in forty-eight hours.’
I thanked him and went on my way.
Two days later I returned to the surgery, whereupon the receptionist charged me twenty-one pounds for a piece of A4 paper that said I was healthy.
