Consider this piece of NHS behaviour

In two minds here about the NHS - we have all these reports coming in, footage and so on, to the point that one does wonder what they're playing at.

Against that is the way I've been personally treated and really, it is wildly variable.  At one end of the scale, I can hear the voice answer the phone and then it undergoes a change after reading my details, in almost all cases it becomes kindly and super-helpful. I mean that.

There've been key examples, e.g. with the blood test where, according to the new rules, it may have been iffy for me. But both the lady arranging it and the lady doing it with me at the place were as good as I've ever seen [which, by the way, is super-helpful].  That's the nice bit.

However, occasionally I phone and also found a couple of days ago in actually visiting face to face, and yes, I did wear a mask out of respect, making no snide remarks - occasionally I find the opposite - the NHS we see reported each day with what can only be described as fascistic up front attitude.  Really bad attitude, bureaucratic in the extreme.

To describe this attitude, it's as if someone senior intimated to her that she's a 'senior' person now and has to learn to be a bitch, that she's in line for promotion, thus she acts 'snappily' - come on, come on, move along, there are many patients we have to deal with, not just you.

Quite, quite different to the ladies I've since found out were all bona fide nurses.  Now I've seen the footage too of the bureaucratic nurse bitchiness to suffering patients and I can say that these nurses were not like that.

And then we get to the silent ones, the ones in the background, the hidden ones a patient never sees, except for a few seconds.  They're called doctors. Once again, I have to be careful because I don't know how they intertwine with the system,  It may well be that mine is looking after me in the totality of knowledge about what's going on.  It's possible.  The last time I saw a doctor per se was late 2019 and she had me drop my gear and shoved her fingers into a place I shan't mention, don't know if that did anything for her or not.

Anyway, I am getting to the point, believe it or not - let's hypothetically choose a date, not the right one - let's say the 20th of the month.  All right, that's when I'm due to collect my heart meds.  At least, that's when I collected them last month.  Now, meds are every 28 days, so that would mean a collection date of the 18th of this month.  And if the meds had been taken correctly, then I'd run out on that collect date.

But as everyone knows, there are always anomalies over time and a patient ends up with maybe a few days more of this med or that. What I've noticed for four or five months is they always try to make it later than the 28 days now - the doctor does - and then reception asks if I have enough until [whatever date].  I never analysed that until this month, stoopid me.

This month, my friendly nurse gave the game away - we went through the hoops, the approval was given, but then the doctor herself stopped the approval, held it over until four days before last month's, i.e. the 16th.  I checked with the pharmacist herself and yes, it came through on the 16th [hypothetically].  But the pharmacy has a set policy of 72 hours and in short - the doctor was making my meds one day late, by fiat.  She'd approved them a week and a half before but deliberately held them back.

Now we come to patient stress. If anyone would know about patient stress, it's my doc and yet here she is doing this, something which can do nothing else but cause stress. Deliberately.  I have a theory and it's that my manner is always calm in public, even confident.  They don't like that, they don't like patients being in charge of their own minds and bodies.  They don't see it as a patient-doctor dialogue.  Does not compute.

The nurses, not being as godlike in the NHS system, don't always climb onto pedestals- the young ones do but the mature ones generally don't, they were trained in a different era.  Just thoughts, it might be different for you of course where you are.