Just another day at the office...

Sometimes you can go for months without incident. Other times, a bit like London Busses, everything comes along at once. Seems we’re going through one of those phases in our neck of the woods. Thankfully, thus far the “Flandemic” has not lived up to its billing.

Yet.

We expect the next big scare in November or December, unless something quite bizarre happens in the interim. For now the daily email updates are moving to once or twice a week, and the planners really do seem to have a strategy in place. Whether the plan will survive more than half the work force being laid low themselves, or kept at home looking after kids/ elderly relatives who cannot care for themselves, remains to be seen. Still there is a plan.

No, this morning saw a string of genuinely troubled individuals facing potentially or already determined life threatening illness. Once again, by mid morning the surgery was more than an hour adrift with no prospect of catching up. After three patients already watching the sands of time draining from their own personal hourglasses at an alarming rate, came a mum bereaved not once, but twice in the space of six months. Her distress was etched almost bone deep on her face, and there was absolutely nothing to say except “hang in there” and “you will survive this”. I’m not sure if I was saying this for her or for myself to be honest, but after half an hour she was cried out enough, for now, to keep putting one foot in front of the other for a bit longer.

After a ten minute pause, and a half a bucket of Java, we got the show on the road again, and the rest of the day passed without incident. The poor souls who had had to wait around in our waiting room with not even drying paint to watch for amusement (all diversionary materials having been carted off and incinerated to remove possible vectors for the flandemic), were amazingly good natured, and by mid afternoon there was more laughter than tears accompanying the ebb and flow of the afflicted coming trough the hallowed portals.

Still not a day I’ll be forgetting in a hurry, or wishing to repeat any time soon. But I can’t help thinking, for all that, that I’m the one who’s got it easy here.