…I had to go to the doctor’s again today.
After waiting 40 minutes we saw [the same person as last week].
My infected ear has got better but I was still deaf in it, and my left ear was the same.
I had a hearing test and the results were LOW.
Gulp.
I am now taking medicine…
The thing that strikes me most about this passage is the waiting time: 40 minutes. I’d forgotten how bad things had become by the mid-late 80s. A waiting time of at least half an hour was simply, if grudgingly, accepted. Looking back through recent entries I see that I always had to wait at the surgery, even when I got my “emergency appointment”. But I never complain about it. I state it as a fact. A fact of life.
Thank goodness that sort of thing is now safely confined to a previous century. Oh wait a minute…
Twenty-five years ago today 
I seemed to spend an inordinately long amount of time waiting during my childhood, way past the scheduled time. I remember when I was eleven having a series of appointments at the chiropodist having a verruca seen to, always on a Friday teatime and always at least an hour late, I think once even two hours late. I was always the last patient of the day too so it was always an absolutely deserted waiting room, and it was an old Victoria building as well with really high ceilings and winding corridors so it felt like we were trapped in some kind of prison. I exhasted all my comics during these waits, and in those days I got a lot of comics.