satirical

• “How to Irritate Your Consultant in Five Easy Steps”—a handy, satirical survival guide for the chronically ill rebel who refuses to behave like a docile NHS statistic: How to Irritate Your Consultant in Five Easy Steps Because illness is hard enough without surrendering your personality too.

Step 1: Arrive Informed—A.K.A. Their Worst Nightmare Before your appointment, read everything. Medical journals, dodgy Reddit forums, patient blogs, the back of your medication box—anything. Then casually drop phrases like “emerging evidence suggests” or “have you seen the latest NICE guidelines update?” Watch the colour drain from their face as they realise you might know what you’re talking about. Bonus points: Quote a study they haven’t read. Wait for the squirm.

Step 2: Refuse to Speak in Bullet Points They love a clean symptom list: “Fatigue. Numbness. Blah blah blah.” Instead, give them the full poetic experience: “It’s like my limbs are made of lukewarm jelly and my brain’s running Windows 95.” They’ll try to summarise it with “patient reports fatigue.” Interrupt with: “No, it’s existential fatigue. There’s a difference.”

Step 3: Make Jokes Oh, they hate this. You’re supposed to be weeping softly, not cracking one-liners. Try these: “So when do I evolve into my final Pokémon form: WobbleSaurus Rex?” “If I fall again, I’ll need a loyalty card for A&E.” “Does this come with a prize for ‘Least Functional Nervous System’?” They’ll either laugh nervously or refer you to psych. Either way, you win.

Step 4: Express Unfiltered Opinions Don't be afraid to question The System™. Say things like: “Do you actually read my notes or is that just for show?” “Gosh, it's wild how I had to chase eight departments for a scan I didn’t want in the first place.” “Do any of you talk to each other, or is this NHS-wide charades?” You’ll see them twitch, possibly make a note that says “difficult.” Wear that badge proudly.

Step 5: Be Consistently Human This is the final nail in the coffin. Cry a little. Laugh mid-sentence. Tell an unrelated story about a pigeon that made you feel seen. Say, “Some days I want to scream into a cushion, but I’d probably miss the cushion and dislocate something.” They won’t know what to do. They prefer data over depth. You’ve brought personhood into their spreadsheet. Unforgivable.

Bonus Round: Refuse to Be Fixed They’ll want a treatment plan, a “solution,” something they can tick off. Say, “I don’t want a cure today. I just want to be understood.” Boom. Consultant meltdown in three... two... one...

In Summary: Be curious. Be messy. Be sarcastic. Be loud in a system that prefers whispers. And never, ever, let them forget that you're not a diagnosis—you’re a whole, infuriating, brilliant human being.

looking to buy a second hand q100 wheelcair or similar in the devon cornwall area sick@mylivinghell.co.uk *

       “The views in this post are based on my personal  
          experience. I do not intend harm, only honesty.”