The last time I went to a GP was in 1999. I was at university and I’d been troubled by a series of irritating heart palpitations which I put down to – well – I couldn’t give a fuck what they were down to, to be quite honest. I was 19 so they were hardly likely to be fatal.
But then they got a bit scarier and my lovely girlfriend-at-the-time, Claire, insisted that I Seek Medical Advice. So I did. Just to shut her up.
As it turned out, lovely Claire probably had a point as the GP sent me straight off to hospital for an electrocardiogram test and, when that wasn’t conclusive, an echocardiagram a few weeks later. And then more and more tests for about a year.
Long story short – you know the expression “his heart’s in the right place”? Well turns out mine isn’t. Not quite. And it only took them twelve months of scaring the shit out of me with phrases like ‘cardiomyopaphy’ and scrawling the abbreviation ‘?LVH?‘ on my notes in the hope I wouldn’t know what it meant, before they decided that I wasn’t going to drop dead at any second.
So you can understand why I’m not mad-keen on going to the doctor if I can possibly avoid it.…
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