The electronic voice called out my name and invited me into my GP’s office. I knocked on the door and entered to find my beaming doctor waiting for me.

“So, it was a good job I ordered a retest of your calcium levels!” she said, smiling, half proud, half relieved.

“First of all I saw your phosphates were low, but then your calcium came back pretty high twice. So we’ll just see what happens with the scans that you need doing, but it’s good that we picked it up.”

“Yes,” I responded (I need a refresher in UK vs US quotation marks and commas), “and now that I don’t have lung cancer any more, I can smoke again.”

Of course, I resisted the temptation to throw that one in, but I did mention that it was nice that I wasn’t dying yet, trying to convey sincerity.

The great thing about where I live, or rather where I pretend to live, is that the GPs have access to your hospital diagnostics because they have a rather snazzy integrated health records system. I mentioned the vitamin D therapy and she asked if I’d been retested at my recent hospital visit. Logging in, she noted my test results. “You really don’t need to take any more vitamin D!” she exclaimed, “and don’t be too concerned about your nearly dangerously high levels of calcium. You are feeling ok, aren’t you?”

She’s lovely, my GP. When I first encountered her eleven or so years ago, it was to beg her to let me come off Seroxat, but she insisted that I stayed on them for at least a year. Today we discussed coming off my current medication and she allayed my concerns about the side effects of reducing its dose. I’m not concerned about coming off antidepressants, I don’t feel the need for my stabilisers any more, but coming off medication that affects your brain chemistry can have the most unwelcome effects on your synapses.

So this is it. Fourteen months of hell are behind me, with the occasional wobble anticipated, and I am looking forward to finding myself again. Not certain what my next incarnation will be just yet, I’m certain that I’m never going to allow myself to be treated badly by anybody ever again.

Huge bonus today was that I was actually served by the pharmacist when I picked up my scrip. She even spoke to me, asked me if I wanted a bag for the toothpaste I was buying. *sighs*

Horsey, horsey
The horse beef scandal has me slightly amused. Part of me thinks, this is actually a pretty dreadful state of affairs, which of course it is. Another part of me thinks, if people didn’t buy these crappy ready meals and cooked their own food with ingredients that they know are bona fido (sic) what they’re supposed to be, then they wouldn’t have these concerns. Plus, cooking your own stuff from scratch is cheaper and healthier and far more satisfying.

It’s an educational and cultural problem that needs to be addressed, but other than banning ready meals and takeaways, I don’t see how it’s going to happen.

I see harassed women at supermarkets with trolleys full of varieties of frozen ready meals for their families. One child will eat one thing, another something different, Mum something else, Dad, probably a takeaway. It just wasn’t like that when I was a kid. We all ate the same thing, prepared freshly by my mum, sometimes using off-cuts of meat, or bulking out a bolognese sauce with beans to make it go further.

The supermarkets do try their best to give recipe ideas to people, “feed a family of four for a fiver” guides, Jamie Oliver has tried his best too. But unless people are actually taken to the supermarkets and shown what to buy and then how to cook it, allowing them to build the confidence to do it themselves, then nothing is going to change. I note, however, that the Government plans lessons in cooking in schools so that every school leaver will know how to cook 20 meals. This only applies to England and Wales because you don’t need lessons in deep frying mars bars and pizza.

I made a simply delicious soup tonight. Unfortunately, it did turn into something akin to the Magic Porridge Pot and just kept growing and growing. I have some for lunch and dinner tomorrow, and possibly for lunch the day after. The fridge is still stocked with more of the vegetables to make some more, but I might donate these to my parents; I’m all souped out.

Back to the horsebeef thing though, I’m expecting Waitrose or M&S to pull a marketing coup by starting to stock prime horse fillet on their shelves. “This is no ordinary rib-eye steak. This is our 28 day matured 84 oz Aintree rib-eye steak.”

I thank you.