Friday, November 25, 2005

Doctor phobia

I had to laugh today, I got a letter from the doctors asking if I wanted to remain on their list, because I've not contacted them for a long time.

Let's get this accurate, I've never been, not even for a new patient appointment. I moved here just over 2 years ago, and I've never been to my new doctors. In fact I'm not even sure exactly where it is, my mother signed me up!

Regardless of my obesity, it's never really caused me health issues. In fact the last time I went to the doctors was to get a sick note cancelled! After I broke my ankle I kept on getting nice long sick notes, and towards the end it got to the point where I was about to go down to half pay. I had had my cast of by then and could get around OK, if I'd been on full pay I'd have finished off that sick note, but I couldn't really afford to stay off on half pay so had to go for a medical to check I was OK to go back.

I used to have irregular periods. Very irregular. I went to the doctors once, and had a blood test for PCOS. I never went back for the results. To be honest, it didn't bother me, and the thought of being "treated" to give me more regular periods that I didn't want anyway didn't exactly appeal. The whole fertility thing doesn't bother me at all, and I just couldn't justify taking time off work to go and find out something that would make very little difference to my every day life.

I don't have smear tests. I don't need them. Actually, this is one thing that puts me off going to the doctors. I just know that I'll be called on to explain my continued recalcitrance (particularly in view of the fact that my sister's last smear showed pre-cancerous cells, and therefore I should be careful about this sort of thing). But the fact remains that I'm pretty much zero risk, so I don't want to go through intrusive procedures for little benefit.

And the big one. I didn't go to the doctors, because I knew it would involve being weighed. It was nice living in ignorance not owning up to what I needed to do. Of course, I knew it, the fact I was avoiding admitting it proved that well enough. Had I not realised, I wouldn't have been worried about being weighed because I wouldn't have known it would be bad. If that makes sense. But even though I knew that I had to do this, and I knew that I would be told that, I wanted to leave it so that I could decide to do it on my own terms, at my own time.

I didn't want pressure, or expectation, or lectures. I wanted space, and I wanted to live a while before getting down to it. I didn't want to be told what to do, I wanted to work it out for myself. I'm like that. I want to do things my own way, even if my way is everyone else's way, I want to decide to do it by myself. Stubborn or independent? I'm not sure it makes much difference.

So I ignored the pleas in pretty much every diet book to see your doctor before starting trying to lose weight. (Actually, I ignored the rest of pretty much every diet book, so there's not much change there). I have no idea about all the stats that I sometimes see banded around, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglericides etc etc. It would be nice to have a measure of my progress, but then I have so many of those I can cope without. In fact, there's probably no official record of my highest weight, or the progress I've made.

One day I'll go back to the doctors, I have little to hide now. But that would involve getting ill first!

1 Comments:

Blogger theaddict said...

Oh you are so lucky indeed!

9:43 PM  

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