Awkward Turtle

I may or may not have mentioned (who knows?) my crack team of endocrinologists* who seem to be as numerous as the autumn leaves.** On the one hand, I enjoy meeting new people; on the other, I have an incredibly poor memory for names and consequently can only remember the names of two-and-a-half of the endocrinologists who've actually treated me.***

For the first four months or so of my treatment I consistently saw the same doctor when I went to the hospital; then, for reasons never specified he disappeared. Since then, I've seen different doctors every couple of months. I can only presume that I'm committing some kind of hideous endocrinological faux pas without realising it.

Anyway, the other weekend I was at the local train station, and joined an epically long queue to buy a ticket. As I was standing there, I suddenly became aware that in the queue in front of me was.... my original endocrinologist, Dr ---!

I had to make a choice: say hi or stand by? And obviously I went for the stand by option - because when you're a doctor, I imagine it's very annoying to have former patients come up to you in a public railway station screaming "WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME? WAS MY HEAD TUMOUR NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH FOR YOU?" and wailing and gnashing their teeth. Also, he looked somewhat stressed and was doing that peculiar leg-hopping thing that means somebody's either running late or desperate for the loo.

Unfortunately, when I said that this was an epically long queue, I was exaggerating only inasmuch as the fact that, although it was extremely long, no-one had actually written a poem about it. To my knowledge. After a few minutes of trotting through a winding s-shaped queue, I think Dr --- may have recognised me, but by then the English Acknowledgement Horizon had passed and, having not acknowledged one another before then, it was officially too late to do so. Because I am English (well, English-ish). And those are the rules we live by.

So it was a somewhat awkward queueing experience.
If only I had defused it by means of the awkward turtle.

Inicdentally, I feel like what I had intended to be a short, short post about a very brief and really-not-that-exciting occurrence has turned into an alarmingly long and overinvolved essay. I promise, next time I will attempt to write about something more interesting.

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*N.B. that here that I use the term "crack team" in the sense of "expert professionals", not in the sense of "drug dealers".

**Or maybe it's just one guy with five masks. And a pair of fake boobs.

*** If you're interested, the half is for one guy whose nickname I remember, but not his actual name, which had about eight times as many syllables.