Working Hard

My brain is full of things to do. My patients are waiting. Some of them are grumpy. I am promising haste, but I cannot deliver. I have a fairly constant little voice at the back of my mind saying "there's something I've forgotten to do..."

This is entirely normal for a GP. Every day is spent frantically trying to do more than enough, to keep everyone happy, to allay fears and fill forms that need to be in tomorrow and fix that problem that's been going on for years. 

I am delighted to back in the thick of it, but I miss those days when I had all the time in the world to sit with a lonely widow, or crack through the steely facade of a scared father. 

I have other work to attend to as well. 

Keeping healthy is not as straightforward as you might think. 

First, there's the compulsory eight hours sleep. 

Then.

Oats (organic, stone-ground).
Berries (boiled to get rid of hepatitis). 
Bananas (not too many, your potassium will go bananas).
Green tea (not too much, it'll suck up all your folic acid).
Coffee (minimum 2, maximum 6 cups a day).
Wholemeal bread. No, sorry, wholegrain. Spelt if you can get it. Feck it, probably best to avoid gluten altogether. 
Vitamin D. Vitamin B. Vitamin C. Definitely Vitamin K. Not Vitamin E though. 
Probiotics. 
Fermented stuff (bound to be some of that in the back of my fridge...).
No red meat.
No processed pig.
No antibiotic-filled poultry.
No waste-filtering shellfish. 
No tuna (mercury).
No cod (non-sustainable. Save the fishies!)
No blue cheese. 
Organic muslin-strained home-knitted yoghurt. Pronounced correctly.
No unpasteurised dairy. 
Heck, what am I saying, no goddamn dairy at all!
A glass of red wine. One, I said. Red, I said. Not fizzy.
No refined sugar. Only common-as-muck stuff.
No salt. 
Wheatgrass. 
Cacao (whatever happened to spelling it cocoa?)
That stuff that turns into frogspawn when you add water. 
Watercress.
Kale. (Kak).
For the love of god, don't cook the vegetables!
Cook it to death! (see Berries above).

Meditate twice a day, 10 minutes minimum. 
Aerobic exercise, 30 minutes a day.
Pilates.
Yoga.
Aromatherapy.
Hydrotherapy.
Psychotherapy. No drugs though. Those pharma companies are evil disease-mongerers. 
Do not even get me started on the vaccines....

Set goals.
Fill a jar with post-it notes.
Talk to yourself in the mirror.
Pray. And mean it. He'll know, you know. 

Write. Sing. Row. Draw. Run. 





Yes, clever clogses. 
You have spotted that this is a preview of my soon-to-be best seller: The Sick Doctor's Guide to Having a Strong Argument with Cancer. 
A compilation of all the other self-help pulp out there, cleverly disguised as Medical Fact.