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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zedar" data-source="post: 564554" data-attributes="member: 36566">I had been doing a long commute between Bristol and the Welsh Valleys for seven months. Originally, it should have been for seven weeks but the contract kept getting extended. I was getting run down, getting by on four hours sleep a night, and not noticing anything amiss. When things did being to go wrong, the women in the office  assured me it was 'man flu' - it's always man flu, they'd seen it a million times. Since I had had no more than a dozen sick days in a thirty-year career, I didn't think anything was amiss. A couple of times, I found that I was bursting for a pee before getting to work, but so what? Then one morning, I was feeling weak as a kitten and worse, also feeling ravenously hungry. Nothing I ate quenched those hunger pangs. I went to the GP's surgery and I was told to come back at the end of the day and I might be seen if there was an empty slot. This was a group practice in Pontypridd. I'm not naming it since it would be redacted and nearly all the medical practices in Pontypridd can be described thus. This guy was my GP but I'd only seen him twice before over a year earlier. Without any preamble and no examination, he brusquely told me  that I had an ulcer, scribbled a prescription and showed me the door - all done in five minutes. It made no impression on him that I was so weak I couldn't stand and that it had taken me so long to make my way down the corridor to his office he'd thought I would be a no-show. Two days later, my health deteriorating, the staff in the local Co-Op were alarmed enough to call an ambulance. Later, I was told I was dying when I'd been brought in with a BG reading of over 50 and I was a very naughty diabetic for letting myself getting into that state.  That was the Royal Glamorgan for you. I had to assert, hand to God, five times that I had not been a diabetic before they grudgingly believed me. As you can see, the news was broken to me fairly brutally and it was two weeks later before they began to realise they had been remiss in their duty of care to help me deal with the new situation.When I was released from hospital, I returned to that practice but made it clear that I'd have nothing to do with that doctor. Perversely, I'd been told he was the practice's go-to guy for diabetes. When I told them a year later that I was leaving the country, one of the GPs rang me to see if it was true. Since I'd never heard of this happening before, I was pretty sure they'd been looking for the earliest opportunity to get shot of me and destroy the medical records the practice had of me.</blockquote>

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