Confessions of a GP

John had been my patient for a year or so. He was a nice enough bloke but struggled with poor social skills and he was also not particularly blessed in the good looks department. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he had reached his forties without ever having been in a serious relationship and so decided to go on a trip to Thailand to find a wife. I remember him coming to see me before his trip, nervously asking for advice on travel vaccines and malaria prophylaxis. Maybe I should have made the suggestion then that a two-week holiday to Bangkok was perhaps not the best way to find true love. However, I stayed quiet and a few months later John came to see me in order to register his new wife as a patient. Sung was 19. She was beautiful, elegant and also looked absolutely terrified. John looked like the cat who had got the cream. I can’t imagine anything more frightening than being plucked from your family, friends and country, to be put into a cold, grey, unfriendly town with a much older and slightly odd man who was now your husband. She also barely spoke a word of English. Perhaps it was true love but I doubted it.

John was present during my first consultation with Sung. I asked Sung a question and when she looked at me blankly, John offered to help translate. I was impressed that John had learnt Thai, only to find that instead of translating my question into Sung’s native language, he just repeated it in English but shouted in a slightly odd stereotype of a Chinese accent. It was like a Russ Abbot sketch from the 1980s.

After a few months, while her husband was at work, Sung started to learn English at a language school and took a part-time job in a burger bar with other students her age. It was not long after this that John came to see me with symptoms of painful discharge from his penis. I did a swab because I suspected chlamydia. Chlamydia can hang around undetected for a long time, but I didn’t think that John had been anywhere near a woman for years until Sung came along. John had also proudly told me that Sung was a virgin when they got married. It seemed fairly obvious to me that Sung was sleeping around, but what did I tell John? When the results came back from his swab, I explained that chlamydia was a sexually transmitted infection and advised that Sung came in to be tested and treated as well. Despite them both having a course of antibiotics, John came back with another sexually transmitted infection not long afterwards. I tried to hint gently that these infections were probably coming from outside of the marriage but John simply couldn’t accept that this could be possible. How much right did I have to interfere with this relationship? John was blinkered and in love. Sung was 19 and having fun with lads of her own age. I was watching this car crash unfold each week. If John were a friend, maybe I would have given him a shake and pointed out the obvious, but he wasn’t a friend, he was my patient.

A few months later, Sung left John for a 20-year-old boy who played bass in a band. John was devastated and ended up on antidepressants. ‘Why didn’t you tell me she was being unfaithful?’ he blubbed. What could I say? My job was to point out the facts and hope that John reached his own conclusions. Perhaps I should have made those facts a little clearer.

Dead people

I’ve seen loads of dead people but I’m still quite scared of corpses. As a hospital doctor, one of my jobs was to go and certify death. During a night on call, I would be covering ten or more wards and be up most of the night doing odd jobs and reviewing sick patients. I recall one night when, after having just got to bed at about 4 a.m., my pager went off. The nurse on one of the geriatric wards told me that one of the patients had died. It was an expected death so although there was no resuscitation and CPR necessary, a doctor needed to certify the death before the body could be taken to the morgue.