…that I haven’t darkened the door of your surgery in over a year.
This is a long, long saga, but probably the most appropriate place to begin is thursday night, when I noticed that the newest member of our family (young Daniel, aka the Tiny Boy, age 4 days) was getting a very gunky eye. This is generally no big deal - I had exactly the same thing happen with the other two, and the nurses always say the same thing - keep wiping it with clean wet cotton wool balls, and squirt a little breast milk in there regularly (it has great germ-fighting properties). Which I did. But the treatment didn’t really cut it, and when the health nurse came round on friday she said “you know, you’re probably going to need a prescription for that”.
Which is how I found myself, at 2pm on a friday, ringing round doctors offices to see if anyone had a spare appointment slot before the weekend. I started with our usual doctors, who were too polite to laugh in my face, but … “today? um, no - booked out. Tomorrow? Booked out too.” So my next stop was the doctors across the road from them - a place that I used to visit, but have avoided for the past year, after a very dodgy experience involving my eldest daughter.
Of which, more later.
It turns out, then had a free slot. In fact, I discovered as I was in the waiting room later, they had multiple free slots. Red flag number one (especially as there was only one doctor on duty, and the full place had four). I wasn’t hugely keen on going back there, but WTH - it was a case of sticky eye, how complicated can this be? So off we went.
This is a condensed version of the conversation I had with the doctor, on getting in for my appointment:
<blah blah blah…red inflamed eye>
Oh yes. That looks a little nasty, doesn’t it. Hmmm. We could treat it with chlorohexadrin maybe. Of course, that’s not entirely safe for him … mumble mumble … bone marrow … mumble mumble…
Umm - I’m not really comfortable giving him something you think is not entirely safe. Any other alternatives here? I’d rather have something that took a bit longer to work and was safer.
Oh, just thinking out loud. Mmm. We could try some Soframycin. I think that should be safe enough. (looks it up in a little booklet) - yes. Used for the treatment of …blah blah blah conjunctivitis blah blah hernia, flu, cancer, black plague … yes, that mentions conjunctivitis, I think that should be a good one. Can’t see any side effects mentioned. Most of these things are pretty strong though. I think I’d recommend giving him a drop every hour or two, then drop back to three times a day for a couple of days, then stop and see how it goes. Don’t do it for more than three or four days.
Ok, fine.
Now, what you should do is to store it in the fridge, and then before you give it to him, just warm it up in your hand for a few minutes, or dunk it in a little container of boiling water, that makes it much nicer when you put it in his eye.
Ummm…ok (Note: I have absolutely no intention of following the second of these suggestions - dunk something that needs to be kept in the fridge in boiling water? That sounds like a Really Really bad idea to me)
Nice healthy looking baby apart from that. Did you have a good pregnancy?
Yes, pretty good.
Follow a nice healthy low-fat diet?
No, not particularly.
Oh. Um. Really. (at this point, he looks at me surprised. Now, as it happens, at the moment I’m about 6 kilos overweight. But hey, I just gave birth less than a week ago. I fully expect Daniel to fix this problem just as efficiently as his sisters, in their respective times, did. I’ve never bothered with low-fat anything in thirty-seven years of life, and I’m certainly not going to start while I’m pregnant). So… you would have eaten lots of full-fat foods then? Cheese, milk, all those dairy products. Fried foods.
Yep, all that.
You know, there’s a link between high fat diets in pregnancy and anxiety in children.
Hmm… we’ve actually had this conversation before. About a year ago.
Yes?
Yes, I brought my eldest daughter with a problem about frequent weeing, which I thought might be a UTI, and you diagnosed anxiety and gave her a dietary supplement to try
Inositol?
Yes, that’s the one. And then the next week she complained about actual pain when weeing and we took her to a different doctor, who had her tested for a UTI, and it turns out she actually did have one, which is what I thought in the first place. And the other doctor gave us a prescription which cleared it up completely. So I wasn’t totally happy with your diagnosis in that instance.
Oh. Well, you know, it’s a proven link - high fat diets in pregnancy, anxious kids.
Uhuh.
Nobody knows it but me. Been doing a PhD on it since 1993 (I swear on my honour - the rest of this conversation is a reconstruction, but THAT statment is absolutely verbatim). High fat diets - anxious children - I’ve got hundreds of case studies.
The thing is, I actually wouldn’t call Rachel “anxious” at all.
Oh?
I had a bit of a problem with this last time - you seemed to conflate being an introvert, which she is, to being anxious.
Oh, introversion, anxiety, same thing.
I really disagree with that.
Oh yes, it’s all the same. Social anxiety, you know. Often manifests in adolescence. You know, in childhood they eat all these cereals - weetbix and conrflakes and things, with lots of natural Inositol, and then they stop eating them in adolescence and you start to see this anxiety.
Uhuh. But that’s not introversion. Being in introvert is all about whether you need lots of people around, not whether you’re anxious or not. It’s about being comfortable on your own.
Well, you know, you should really try her on some Inositol, I guarantee you’ll see a big difference in her behaviour after a few days.
I’m perfectly happy with her behaviour. I don’t think she needs ‘fixing’. I’m an introvert myself. It’s a personality type, not a disorder.
Oh no. anxiety, introversion, all the same. You should try some Inositol yourself. Or plenty of good Inositol-containing foods - cereals, rockmelon, porridge…
So, if high fat diets in pregnancy are a cause of anxiety, I suppose we should be seeing a lot less anxiety than, say, fifty years ago.
Oh, I don’t know about that.
But lots of people these days eat low fat food, which wasn’t the case a few decades ago. “Low fat” versions of things hardly existed before about the 80s, and people weren’t particularly worried about avoiding fats or dairy products or whatever.
Oh, people eat very unhealthy diets these days. Takeaway foods, fatty foods. You know, thirty percent of women still smoke during pregnancy (Note: this seems high to me even as an estimate of how many women smoke AT ALL)
But they would have done that even more fifty years ago, wouldn’t they?
Oh yes. Fats, butter, cheese. Chocolate cake. Oh yes, very unhealthy.
But you think the amount of anxiety in the community has gone up?
Oh, there’s lots of anxiety around. Lots of fat, lots of anxiety. It’s a proven link. I’ve got hundreds of case studies.
Ok thanks bye.
So there you have it. Introverts of the world - you just need a spoon of Inositol every so often and you’ll be a nice happy extrovert just like God intended. Who are, of course, never anxious about anything. Then you can give your mum a big smack for all that cheese she ate when you were tiny.