Walking The Dog

How to switch off. Switching off is hard at the best of times, but as this is the furthest from the best of times that any of us has ever experienced, right now switching off is well nigh impossible. Or is it just me? Despite Life in a time of covid-19 - parts 1 to 4 and my advice to find our happy place; practise the ten daily gratitudes; and to be kind to ourselves, I find that I am not very good at practising what I preach. My mind jumps from one thought to another and my actions start and stop in a desperate attempt to keep up with my thoughts. Maybe meditation ... or regular exercise ... or a good book ... or gardening ... or a walk with the dogs ... or baking ... or sorting through the freezers ... I'm doing it again: sprinting towards a finish line along a track filled with distracting potholes and all the time having to find different ways of not falling in. Or if these ways are unsuccessful, of actually falling in - I walk into a room and find I don't know why I...

Do you remember that tight feeling in your hand at the end of exams - the clawed, feels-like-I-dipped-them-in-cement-three-hours-ago stiffness of fingers clamped round a pen; the numb divots in finger pads, and the heavy, whole arm and shoulder ache? I remembered it yesterday. First we had loo-roll shortages, swiftly followed by a complete disappearance of pasta and paracetamol and dog food and nappies, now there are shortages of medicines. But before you panic ... yes, there's a shortage of some things, but most common medicines are available in many different brands or there are 'similar enough' medications to make logical swaps. Though by the end of yesterday, logic was beginning to give way to desperation as our pharmacists started calling patients to check if they had really run out or could wait a couple of weeks. We live in very strange times. These shortages are a small and probably temporary part of that strangeness and will be lost as the bigger picture comes in...

First - no I didn't: have to don PPE at work yesterday (... see the Life in a time of covid-19 - part 2 blog if you're confused). This was a huge relief. But I have vastly more than huge respect for all those who did. As GPs ... I've never admitted to being one here before but hey ho times change ... we are usually on the frontline but right now the frontline has washed into the A&E departments and we are left with phone calls; lots of them. We're doing what is called telephone triage which basically involves speaking to many worried well; issuing too many prescriptions for antibiotics to sore throats and earaches; and trying to diagnose rashes from descriptions of how red or sticky they are. Video calls are coming but what looked like plain sailing last week has veered off into choppy waters with messages not sending properly or sending twice or the process freezing on screen almost like its afraid of something; maybe its moment of being the rabbit in the headl...

The words 'happy place' probably turn the title of this blog into an oxymoron, coming after the eight words and numbers that precede them. I don't think many of us are feeling particularly happy at the moment. Me - I'm anxious; nervous; and sitting on the edge of my chair (which is possibly more to do with the general decrepitude of the chair and its broken undercarriage than any agitation I'm feeling). Why ... am I anxious - not why do I persist with a broken chair? Well - partly the obvious, the p word ... pandemic; but also two other words beginning with p. Might I have to put on PPE (personal protective equipment) at work tomorrow? Personal and protective. Personal - to me; to keep me safe. Protective - is it? I'll park that particular worry for now and deal with it tomorrow. There's nothing I can do about it today. You see, this is why I need to focus on my happy place. Why I need to escape. If I step back for a moment from the anxious l...

It feels like we are stuck in the opening credits of a disaster movie. But this is a cinema we cannot leave. And there are too many directors trying to tell us - the extras - what to do. So we stop listening and follow each other. And as the cameras roll, the dystopian world of the film descends into chaos and panic. The problem is this film is real. So what are our options? Well, it appears that a lot of people have selected option 1. The panic option. The option driven by an escalating drip drip of confused and contradicting information. The rabbit hole we hurtle down in a frenzy of wide-eyed suffocating fear as we search and search and search for information on the internet; read terrifying tweets and skip the too doom-laden headlines that we see, but are too scared to open. Some have selected option 2. The it-won't-happen-to-me option. The we-suddenly-find-ourselves-on-a-paid-and-mortgage-free-holiday option. The scientists-are-jargon-spouting-nerds option. The irrespon...