Opinion

A case of Bangkok swimmer's itchy truth

by Mary Selby 30-Apr-08

Revenge may be sweet, but I never score the tiniest point without Murphy's law biting me.

For example, Mr Wombat had just come back from Australia. They do things differently in Oz. They have summer when we have winter, and Elle MacPherson and rugby and blokes who know how to hold their beer and spiders that really bite. In Oz they are macho. Even their sharks are enormous, and their jellyfish, well, did I know about their jellyfish?

I did, I said patiently, but how could I help? Well, the doctor in Australia said that once he got back here he should come to me for a check-up, owing to his having spent six hours in the sea after his dinghy capsized.

Carefully I ascertained that this had been six hours during which he was not stung by a box jellyfish, eaten by a shark nor borne away by mermaids singing 'Waltzing Matilda'. No, the Aussie doc had ruled out all the macho stuff, but as the immersion had taken place a day before his return home suggested that further 'tests' could be done.

I eyed Mr Wombat thoughtfully. He was slightly more wrinkled than one would expect of a healthy 30-year-old, but he did not in any other way look like a man who had been immersed in sea water for six hours.

He looked more like a man who had been immersed in Bangkok for six hours and indeed, on further questioning, he had had a stopover. I wondered aloud what he wanted me to test him for.

'Things he might have caught,' he said in surprise. Through his skin. Like bilharzia. I told him that since he hadn't been swimming in Lake Malawi (where everyone gets bilharzia) nothing had gone up his willy, and his skin was pretty clever stuff when it came to holding off the combined pathogens of the world's great oceans, but he wanted blood tests and a scan.

Blood tests I can do, quoth I, scans I can't unless you've got something worth scanning, which you haven't. He muttered the Sheila word and I took the blood and revenge. It gave me great satisfaction to write 'ex Australia' under 'clinical details'.

Of course I got a phone call. 'G'day doc,' said the locum microbiologist. 'About this form ...' Bugger.

Dr Selby is a GP from Suffolk. Email her at GPcolumnists@haymarket.com