Confessions of a GP

Dear Probation Officer,

We both know Darryl is an unpleasant little scrot who will do anything to slime his way out of trouble and get out of doing any work. He tells me he had a bit of a snuffly nose last week (boo hoo) and now wants me to write a letter so he doesn’t have to go back to court to face a breach of his community service order.

Please send him straight to jail and lock him up for ever as I am in a particularly unsympathetic mood due to the fact that I’m running late because of time-wasting twats like Darryl.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Benjamin Daniels

This was the letter I would love to have written. One day I will write it and bask in momentary satisfaction before they suspend me for unprofessional conduct and Darryl comes to my house and beats seven lumps of shit out of me. I hoped the probation officer would read between the lines of the more mundane letter that I actually wrote:

Dear Probation Officer,

Darryl tells me that he couldn’t go to his community service last Thursday as he had symptoms of a viral infection. He was not examined at the time and his symptoms have since resolved.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Benjamin Daniels

Nothing in this letter required any small degree of medical knowledge or skill, but the very fact that it was written by a doctor rather than his aunt Doris meant that Darryl would probably get off the hook with the court and avoid going to jail.

The pat dog

My last hospital job before I became a GP was in psychiatry. I already knew that I wanted to be a GP by this stage and, given the large amount of psychiatry in general practice, I thought that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend six months learning a bit more about mental health. The job I had was actually in forensic psychiatry. I was on a locked ward with patients who were supposedly ‘criminally insane’. I loved going to parties and telling people I was a forensic psychiatrist. It sounds good, doesn’t it? It gave people the impression that I was akin to the Robbie Coltrane figure in Cracker, solving crimes and bringing insane criminals to their knees with my brilliant questioning and diagnoses. The reality, of course, was very different. I wasn’t really a forensic psychiatrist, I was the junior doctor attached to the forensic psychiatry team. I wandered around the ward doing the odd blood test and checking blood pressures. Occasionally, I would write a letter to the Home Office asking whether a patient would be allowed to go to his sister’s wedding as long as he promised not to drink too much or murder anyone.

The patients themselves were a mixed bunch. They had all committed crimes of some sort while mentally unwell, but many of them didn’t really need to be locked away. One of the lads had set fire to a homeless hostel when he was having scary delusions and hallucinations because of schizophrenia. There was no malice involved in his crime. In his psychotic state he had simply been trying to save the other residents by smoking out the evil spirits. His symptoms were well controlled now by medication and he wouldn’t have hurt a fly; however, arson is taken seriously so he was locked up on our ward. Another patient became quite paranoid when smoking weed. He got into an argument at a party and stabbed someone. I’m not sure if it was the paranoia to blame or simply the stupidity that lots of young blokes have when a bit drunk and stoned. That was ten years earlier, but he remained on our ward because he was still apparently a danger to society.

Our oddest patient was called Tommy. I’m not quite sure what his diagnosis was but he was on the ward because of his sexual disinhibition. He had never raped or sexually assaulted anyone but he used to expose himself a lot and masturbate in public. Tommy was fairly quiet on the ward and the other patients had learnt to tolerate his odd behaviours. They would quite happily sit in the TV room trying to guess the Countdown conundrum while Tommy would be sitting quietly in the corner wanking himself off over Carol Vorderman.