I've been waiting long enough for a diagnosis to the Condition, but now there is one, of sorts, it doesn't make it any the more palatable.
Nor does the fact that it's pretty much what I'd begun to fear it was even before last Thursday's morning on and off the X-ray slab in the most modern hospital I've ever seen in my life.
Much of Monday I spent going from one lab to another in different places, collecting all the outstanding results of September's tests.
Yesterday, I dumped the lot on bloghero Yang's desk.
Then I had to go into AFP and tell the Desk Chief that it looks pretty much as if I've been off work since early May with nothing worse than a psychosomatic case of burnout and no apparent physical explanation for the symptoms.
This is "intellectually highly unsatisfactory", the doctor told me, before adding that "Were it up to me on purely clinical grounds, I'd give you a week to assimilate it. As it is, I suppose we'd better wait on (the specialist)."
Jo was much nicer than many a boss might be in a situation I found very humiliating; more so than I deserved, since given my expression, she remarked, "I thought you were going to say you've got cancer or something."
She even volunteered the information that she wouldn't tell anybody, which I much appreciated and certainly believe. It seems rather pointless, however, given that the Factory is the nearest thing to a sieve I've ever worked in apart from the BBC.
So there you have it, o loyal Four ¾: the Condition has been diagnosed, fairly definitively, as that nebulous thing known as Stress, which is no more or less than a daily part of any decent journalist's life.
(And with a new question mark in the title, it's time to consign the rest of this post, union resignations and all, to a moan story page. Update: Oct 6, 2003)
8:58:32 PM link 
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