Well it’s that time of the year when everyone gets a bit sick/ill/flu-ey..  Whatever you want to call it.   Of course if you travel via tube or train it is also pretty hard to avoid anyone else who might have it as they cough or sneeze over you, or if you avoid it on the transport you will probably have some workmate who comes into work and says they are fine..  even though they look Death’s close cousin.

The main way I’ve found to help ward away the bugs is to regular exercise and have lots of fruit.  I’ve  got my own smoothie machine and normally have one with some ginger even couple of days.

What happens over here if you do get sick is you obviously need to go see a doctor..  Hopefully your registered already, if not this in the important bit

Before you get sick you need to find who/where you local doctor is and go and register with them!  This is important, otherwise they won’t want to see when you do try and go there when you are sick

Of course I found out the hard way a number of times that your local doctor might not be that helpful.  If you are sick and need to go see them ring up as soon as possible on the morning.

When I rang my doctors once on a Monday when I was sick I was told that all the “available” appointments for the day were already gone.  (Obviously there are a number of pre booked appointments with different people).  They asked if I was quite sick.. I said yes.. They said if I was really really sick, then to go the A+E of a hospital.   Otherwise I could get an appointment for the Thursday.   Yes four days later.   I didn’t bother, I was either going to be dead or ok by that stage.

What I did however do is the in between option.   If you can’t get any help from your doctor, there is both an NHS Direct phone line you can call for advice.  It is actually staffed by nurses so it’s not like someone in India is just going to take a message.

Or there are a number of NHS Walk-In Centres available around the country.   The closest and easiest one for me to get to was in Soho Square.  (Which meant that I had to take the tube to get there, now you can see why you can get sick on the tube!)   Sometimes you might have to wait quite a while to get help, it depends what time you go, how many people are working there, and how many other people are generally sick.  I was quite quick when I went there, took about 20 minutes after filling in a few forms and then a doctor/nurse saw me, checked me over and gave me some medication to get well.

Hopefully it won’t happen to you, but there’s the basic options available when you do get sick (apart from 999 obviously!)