Nanna's ways and means.

 

 

My Nanna was a lovely woman. She lived in an era of simplicity and good manners. If she were still chowing down her Ford Pills and smiling at her flying ducks, I am not at all sure she would be thrilled to be rocketing along at today’s fast pace and I am bloody certain she would be mourning the loss of the humble, simple things in life.

She used to wake me with a good strong cup of tea and a couple of buttered wheatmeal biscuits. I felt loved and special – in the old fashioned sense of the word. We lived together for more than a year after Pop died. We’d sit together and talk bollocks and laugh and laugh. I would borrow her clothes and be literally walking out in vintage gear.

She was perhaps the worst dinner cook in the world, but she sure could cook a christmas pudding from scratch and they could be found hanging in the laundry, in their calico skirts 2 months before the big day.

My GP Dr Jane who is but a young woman herself, transported me back to this simple time this week.

Late last week I was besieged by calls from the specialists – firstly the office manager – not the silly cows on the phones and then the next day, the doctor herself rang, full of apologies and explanations and justifications. I did not pull up short of telling her how shitful the treatment had been and she was less than flattered when I told her that I got better after-sales service on my car. It was all pretty fraught but I finally made arrangements to see yet another fucking doctor at the arse end of somewhere in Brisbane next week.

It didn’t dawn on me until I walked into see Jane, that she might have had anything to do with the remarkable turnaround. I asked her and she quickly copped to having rung them and she said that she gave ‘em a bit of a what-for! She said that not often but sometimes she does this cos she sees the specialists getting away with less than she thinks her patients deserve. It was such a reminder of those childhood ‘quacks’ who seemed to know everything about you. Well they did in fact know everything cos they had been seeing you since before you were born.

I reckon this type of doctoring would have pleased my Nanna. Simple and caring and basic and human.

She is a good woman our Dr Jane, my Nanna would have liked her.