Joanne McNeill: The perils of being in pain

Joanne McNeill.

"It's okay to ask for help" is a slogan recently aired in a family violence prevention campaign - but with far wider application.

Sometimes, however, while it might be okay to ask for, help is not so easy to obtain.

Take the case of my friend Doris (not her real name), who has given me full permission to relate her story.

I don't think she'd mind me describing her as a doughty, stoical, low-income, rural widow in her 60s with an endearing streak of whimsy.

After she was widowed, she was forced to become heaps more self-sufficient. Now she wields power-tools and improvises tricky aspects of property maintenance largely on her own, something for which there is no precedent among the urban women of her lineage.

She hates asking for help, too. It feels like weakness.

Back on Good Friday, expecting house guests for a BYO music night (did I mention she likes to sing?) she decided to dig spuds to roast and pick apples for a nice big pie, as her contribution to feeding the hordes. It was raining, so she dug quickly. The next day, when she awoke with a searing pain in her left hip and shooting down the sciatic nerve on that side, she attributed it to over-energetic spadework.

Having suffered sciatica before, she knew that with exercise, after a time of agony, she'd recover.

A month later however pain levels quadrupled, severely curtailing her ability to do anything useful.

Even driving her trusty old ute (with dodgy clutch and armstrong steering) had become a trial.

By then Doris realised she would need to ask for medical help, something she, as a doctor-phobic, conscientious objector about Western medicine, was reluctant to do.

To complicate matters further, technically she did not have a GP because the family doctor she'd consulted (albeit rarely) since the 1970s - through childbirth and the dreaded sciatica - had retired, leaving her high and dry.

And - hailing from a gentler era when family doctors, such as her childhood GP, made house-calls, wore hats, smoked big cigars in the bedroom and painted children's sore throats with iodine - frankly she was in too much pain to tackle the fresh hassle of trusting her precious body to some faceless, passing PHO doc who would doubtless disapprove of her lifestyle.

Meanwhile the pain hit red-alert so, in desperation, she decided to brave Primecare, drove herself there (possibly a danger to traffic), explained the no-GP problem and asked for help. No dice. The kind receptionist sent a kind nurse to explain they couldn't possibly see her; too busy. "Try White Cross, it's just down the road."

In tears by now - because of the stress of having actually worked herself up to asking for help - and staggering with pain she decided she would stop blubbing, stiffen backbone and press on by reviving her flagging sense of humour and viewing the whole ordeal as a kind of adventure tourism; a naive journey through the mystical, wonderful and terrible realms of the health system.

Next week: Doris parks the ute at White Cross and braves the reception desk.