I had my swine flu jab on Saturday (affectionately known round here as the pig poke!).
I wasn’t planning to write about it as I didn’t think I’d have anything more to say than Tim’s wildy entertaining piece had already covered.
Sadly the English experience hasn’t been quite as good as the Scottish one this time round. I spent a thoroughly tedious 90 minutes sitting with hundreds of other people on Saturday morning as a group of very stressed looking NHS staff herded us through the system to be poked.
While I’m in awe of the NHS finally recognising that I have a job and that delivering healthcare on a Saturday is a great idea, I do question the benefit of it in this case when I was pretty much the only person in the building young enough to have a job.
After a perfectly painless poke I was unable to resist rebelling against the system and scandalously skipped my 10 minutes “recovery time”. I felt I’d probably contracted enough germs already, without sitting in an over heated room for ten more minutes listening to people whinge about how much they hate injections.
I read on the interweb that some bloke called Tim in Scotland had his jab and it had no effect on his diabetes. This proves that everything you read on the interweb is rubbish. Six hours after my jab I headed skywards and stayed there for 24 hours before starting to decline. Now the diabetes is back at normal levels but my arm is killing me. Apart from that, I’m remarkably unscathed.
So, what do we learn from this tale? Don’t believe everything you read on the interweb and if you want a pump, come to north west England, if you want a speedily efficient swine flu jab, Edinburgh is the place to be.
I liked your last paragraph – maybe we should put together a map of the best places to go for treatment for various ailments in the UK! We could discover that Merthyr Tydfil is the best place for prompt repeat prescriptions, Norwich is great for cheap vitamins and so on…
don’t try and get a repeat prescription in Leith. They can’t tell the difference between the words “lancets” and “test strips”
@Rachel Well south of the city, they infuriatingly give me one set of test strips instead of three each time I change my meter – it then takes yonks to sort it out – grr!
@Rachel I’m glad it’s not just my Dr’s that can’t read. My insulin quite often comes with hayfever tablets, for no fathomable reason.
@Tim – that’s why I’ve used the same meter for aeons, it takes so long to get the repeat prescription right I can’t risk changing it for anything less than monumental progress.