This Is For You, Doc.

An anecdote from my past

Patients sometimes arrive at their appointment bearing something they have brought for the GP.

A woman once deposited a jobbie on the corner of my desk. I was a young GP, and could still be shocked. It was keeking at me round the edges of a Heinz Sandwich Spread label, threatening. Gnarled, knobbly, and the colour of hazlenuts, it had expanded to press against the inside of the glass jar and metal lid. There was no smell, at least. Such samples were tested at the bacteriology lab, and a braver soul than me would be expected to open it.

I rose and lifted it gingerly, placing it out of sight in the deep stainless steel sink — the one I had once broken by emptying a vacuum flask of liquid nitrogen down its drain: Minus 196ºC — plastic U-bend shattered — flood next day — practice manager not happy. . .

Sitting back down, I forced myself to make eye contact with the turd’s owner — and perhaps its source. I cleared my throat, masked my face with care, and girded my loins in preparation for what was to come.

But no reason emerged to explain why she had brought doings in her handbag. She had come about something else entirely.

I had questions, of course.

Who? For god’s sake, how?

Would it burst out?

What the fuck was I going to do with it?

But unless she mentioned it, I thought the best option was for me not to. Whether she thought I, being a doctor, would know exactly what to do with it and why, I never discovered. We completed the consultation to her apparent satisfaction, and she left.

I did learn one thing. Never again would I put Heinz Sandwich Spread on my ‘piece’. Even now, decades on, I sometimes shiver when asked to twist the lid off a lime pickle or chutney jar. Waiting for the POP!

P.S. I forgot I had left this ‘gift’ in the sink. Oops. Another row from the manager.

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On occasion, someone grateful for their treatment or who is simply being kind, comes with a gift — tomatoes from their garden, or a book they have finished with and thought you might like to read. It’s lovely.

I had one lady who went to Blackpool with her husband every year for their holiday. She always returned with a present for me. One year it was a shiny model of the tower, another time a toy seagull that flew round the ceiling light on a string. Trinkets, and very kind of her.

image by Caspar Aldo

One keen fisherman used to sometimes bring me a trout. He had frozen it on the day it was caught, and kept it for me until his next appointment. “Put it straight in the freezer, Doc, until you go home.” Fortunately there was a small ice box in the staff room fridge. The same man once turned up early on a summer evening, when I was doing an on-call shift at the local Out-of-Hours centre. This time he brought a beautiful, fresh seatrout. He left it at reception while I was busy with a patient, having dropped in on his way home from a fishing expedition. With no fridge, let alone a freezer at the OOH centre, all I could think of was to put it in a sink of cold water until I finished my shift. However, when midnight came and it was time to go home, I forgot about the fish. The next day, the health centre administrator phoned me. ‘Dr Edmunds, did you forget something last night when you went home?’ I was slow to cotton on, and she played with me, dropping hints like ‘something very smelly’ and ‘not what the cleaner wanted to find in a consulting room sink.’ Oops. The water had been tepid at best when it left the cold tap, and the fish would have gradually warmed up over a summer night. I can only imagine the reek it left for the unsuspecting cleaner.

Most often, what a patient brings is something expected, like a sample for testing. ‘Can you bring a sample when you come,’ we would say. What they brought and what they put it in varied. One old lady with no English used to ask her daughter to translate for us. They lived above a local takeway, and the poor daughter was delegated to carry a bladderful of straw-coloured liquid along the road in one of those foil trays boiled rice is often delivered in.

Early in my career I learned always to ask a patient if they wanted their chosen container back. It was after I made the mistake of tossing an empty pill bottle in the bin when I’d tested some urine, only for an affronted lady to say, ‘What are you doing? I need to put my husband’s tablets back in there.’ From then on, I always asked, ‘Do you need this back?’ Usually, the answer was an emphatic ‘no’, but one man reached out for his Tupperware box. ‘Aye, gies it back, I need it for my piece the morn.’

N J Edmunds, August 2025

www.njedmunds.com

A version of this article was first published in iSCOT Magazine, Issue 109.