After my triumph in extracting strong antibiotics from a local GP surgery, I decide to press ahead with this exciting project of getting something back for my taxes. I want to help myself to some of the services at those women’s health clinics one is always hearing about. Ministers are forever singing their praises and begging us to visit them. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that you are not a good citizen until you submit to a gamut of embarrassing tests yearly, thereby saving you and the NHS further bother down the road.
I don’t make the mistake of trying to drive to St George’s Hospital this time. I pay a taxi to ferry me around Tooting, and the vast campus of the hospital itself, until the unit in question magically materialised amid much Urdu swearing. It turns out there is one tiny blue cycling route sign on the main road which points in the hospital’s direction, so the environmental enforcement officers at the local authority who are trying to stop people using cars to get there have not thought of everything, it seems.
When I arrive, I am greeted by an empty reception desk but there is a push button ‘satisfaction’ survey machine whereby I can register the fact that I am being kept waiting.
My presence is eventually acknowledged and I am given a heap of forms mostly concentrating on my ethnic group, country of origin and other matters of social categorisation. I am then seated in an airport departure lounge-style waiting area with joined-together seats, facing a television screen showing episodes of Will & Grace. The patients sit in rows not laughing. Clearly there are limits to the ability of even Paramount Comedy to put smiles on faces.
After not too long, I am taken into a small room where a doctor in her early twenties examines me and tells me she has no idea. I will need more tests, for which there will be a several-hour wait. I press her for any hint of reassurance she may be able to give me which will get me through these worrying next few hours. She shakes her head and intimates that when she says she has no idea, she means she really has no idea.
And so I am dispatched, quietly hysterical with fear, to the section of the radio-graphy unit set aside for women’s things. No sooner am I through the door with my supermarket cheese counter-style ticket — number 73 — than I see this is not going to be easy. All the other women have brought their husbands with them. Possibly they imagined they would be told to wait outside. But it seems the NHS has no hang-ups when it comes to us all just hanging out of hospital gowns together, Sixties summer of love-style. I watch with my mouth open as I witness the routine I am to be subjected to. As each woman’s number is called they are taken to a cubicle with a flimsy curtain almost drawn across, but not quite, and told to take off their clothes and put on a gown. I can see, and so assume the men can, most of what is going on behind the curtain. The half-dressed women then come back out and awkwardly sit down, perhaps next to their husband, perhaps next to another man.
The ward is run by two terrifying women called ‘lead superintendent radiographers’ who sit in offices with the doors permanently wedged open. As the patients sit gloomily staring into space, all dignity now abandoned, the ‘superintendents’ march in and out of each other’s rooms yelling essential information such as: ‘Did you call Roger back? Oooh, I forgot to tell you, Margaret was in yesterday for that form…’
One of them ostentatiously wrestles open a box of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. ‘Breakfast!’ she shrieks, unfathomably finding this fact hysterically funny. She then makes a huge fuss of pouring herself a nice big bowlful and munching her way through it, whilst slurping on a mug of coffee.
When my name is called I have already made a mental pact with myself that I will gladly invite my own demise rather than let one of the crunchy nut commandants order me to strip. ‘I’m not doing it!’ I announce when the nurse hands me the gown and starts to do the spiel. From the look in her eyes, I know I have been identified as a troublemaker. But when I finally get in to see the consultant, who declares me healthy within seconds, she says, ‘I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t get undressed out there either.’ I decide it is pointless to ask why, therefore, such a policy is there in the first place.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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