‘We don’t have an appointment for you!’ yelled the woman sitting behind the reception hatch.
My 87-year-old father stared back at her. He had made this appointment at his local GP surgery in the Midlands and I had flown from Ireland to be with him and my mother when they attended it.
We had the right day and time and he had the confirmation text to prove it. But the receptionist couldn’t find it on her system. ‘You need to move!’ she shouted at my father.
‘I’ve come a long way…’ I tried, to which she shouted back ‘Who are you!’ and didn’t wait for the answer. It wasn’t a question.
Then the receptionist looked beyond my father and fixed a very warm smile on the woman behind him in the queue: ‘Can I help you?’ She peered around us, making a face at the lady behind as if to say: ‘Can you believe what we have to put up with?’
Looking back at my father, she shouted again in a loud patronising voice: ‘Can you move out of the way!’ Turning to the woman, laughing: ‘I’m sorry about this. Can I help you?’
‘No,’ said the woman, looking appalled. ‘This man is first.’ And she nodded to my father looking confused in his Mackintosh.
The receptionist insisted ‘He doesn’t have an appointment…’ and to my father shouted: ‘You don’t have an appointment so you’ll have to go!’ She shook her head. She had one of those ‘You can’t touch me’ public-sector attitudes, along with an air of ‘If you persist I’ll cry harassment’.
My father shuffled away to a bench in the waiting area while I tried to work out what to do. My mother, who has dementia, was already seated and getting confused. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked me. ‘Has your father made a mistake?’ ‘No Mum, he hasn’t made a mistake. Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out.’
I sat my father down and he started to mumble about how nice the receptionist was, how busy she was and how we mustn’t bother her.
This is how he and my mother came to be in their current state, in my opinion. They think the NHS is so good and well-intentioned that if the NHS tells them to jump off a cliff they jump.
And if, as they lie at the bottom smashed to bits, the NHS shouts at them to get out of the way and shove off its waiting lists, they do that. My mother paid for her knee replacement. She paid for both eyes to be done – cataracts and that laser thing they do to clear clots away. My father is about to pay for both his eyes to be done.
He did get the blood clot causing his heart attack pushed through an artery last year on the NHS, but everything else they have paid for, while boasting to anyone who’ll listen – and that’s certainly not me – about how marvellous their NHS is.
It’s why they won’t come to Ireland to live with me and the builder boyfriend in the big house we thought would be so ideal. They can’t leave their NHS. Well, they do need to keep paying for it so other people can use it.
My father got up and tottered over to a machine on the wall called a self check-in and started pressing the keypad. Oh no, I thought.
But after a few seconds he turned round and said: ‘That’s it! Done it!’ He had found his appointment and checked himself in.
The receptionist was on the phone, laughing and gossiping. What a cow. If she noticed he had managed to get through her system she would probably cancel him so I was glad when we got called in a few minutes later.
Sitting in front of the doctor, who was so young my father asked if she was the doctor, we started to explain. My father tried and I tried and then my mother said: ‘Oh dear, what’s happening?’
The doctor shook her head. It was all completely unintelligible. What had happened was this: a charity had been to their house and, after refusing to help with what they had rung them to ask about, had given them something called a ‘Respect’ form, which invited them to make end of life choices.
It portrayed a line, with ‘comfort’ at one end coupled with not being resuscitated, and discomfort at the other end coupled with being revived, upon which my father was asked to place a tick.
What a charity was doing taking this round to old people I found out after ringing them and being told: ‘The NHS makes us give them out.’
‘Oh does it now?’ I said. My father had filled out one for him and one for my mother, and then he took the forms to his GP as instructed by the charity for the GP to sign and tick a box that pronounced ‘Resuscitate’ or ‘Do not resuscitate’ based on their opinion that day.
The GP was meant to give it back and my father was to stick it on the wall in case an ambulance came. But it appeared the doctor had kept it instead. Had he imagined that? In any case, he now felt he had ticked the wrong place.
Of course he did. It was impossible, I realised, looking at a blank version of the form, to tick a right place.
The GP said there was no such form on their files and he should not worry. It occurred to me that perhaps a kind doctor had ripped it up, a rare act of redemption.
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