# The appointment I nearly cancelled > Short fiction. A bruise that had not gone down after three weeks, four days of rehearsing a sentence, and a GP who wanted to know about her iron levels. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-appointment-i-nearly-cancelled/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about adults over 18. Nothing dramatic happens in it. A woman goes to the doctor, which she nearly did not do, and that is all that happens. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, not explicit, and not medical advice. The practical version is on [health conditions and medication](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/health-and-medication/). Three weeks and it was still there. Not sore particularly. Just a hard, defined, unhelpful thing about the size of a plum that had gone through all the colours it was supposed to go through and had then stopped, in a sort of greenish grey, and stayed. Everything around it had faded on schedule. This one had opinions. I looked it up, obviously. I looked it up on four separate evenings and got four separate results ranging from "this is completely normal" to something involving the word haematoma that I read twice and then closed the laptop on. --- I booked the appointment on the Monday for the Friday, which gave me four days, which was three and a half days too many. The first thing I did was write the sentence. Not in my head. On paper, at the kitchen table, like a woman preparing for an interview, because I had decided that if I could get the first sentence right the rest would follow. Version one was "I've had a bruise for three weeks and it's not going." Too open. She would ask how I got it. Everybody asks how you got it. Version two included how I got it, which was a fall, which I would then have to describe, and I got as far as inventing a step outside a friend's house before I put the pen down and had a serious word with myself about the wisdom of lying to a doctor. Version three was the true one, said flatly, and I could not get through it out loud in an empty kitchen without my face going, which did not bode well for saying it to a woman with a computer. --- Wednesday was the worst of it. On Wednesday I constructed, in some detail, the version where she is professional and kind and does the examination and says nothing at all, and then, after I have gone, ticks something. A box, a code, a note in a file that follows me around. I could see the note. I could see the wording of it. And then the version where she asks whether I feel safe at home, in that particular careful voice, and I say yes, and she asks again in a slightly different way, which I know they are trained to do and which I would in any other circumstances be glad about. I got as far as the cancellation page on the app at about eleven that night. It was open. My thumb was on it. What stopped me was not courage. It was a completely stupid thought, which was: if this were on my arm you would have gone last Tuesday. That was it. That was the whole argument, and it was unanswerable, and I shut the app and went to bed. --- Friday, ten past four, a room with a poster about shingles in it and a doctor of about thirty-five who was already typing when I came in. I said my sentence. It came out at about twice the speed I had practised. "I've got a bruise that hasn't gone down in three weeks and I want to make sure it's nothing. It's on my backside. It happened during sex, and it was consensual, and I'm fine." I had put "and I'm fine" on the end at the last second, out of nowhere, as a sort of pre-emptive strike. She said, "Okay. Any others, or just the one?" --- That was it. That was the reaction I had spent four days preparing for. She asked whether I bruise easily generally. She asked what medication I take, and I said the pill and occasional antihistamines, and she asked about ibuprofen, and I said I had been taking it most days for a fortnight for my back, and she said, "Right, that'll be part of it," in the voice of somebody ticking off something predictable. She had a look. Ten seconds, gloves, entirely unbothered, and then a comment that it was in the muscle rather than under the skin, which explained why it was hanging about. She pressed it and asked if it was tender in the middle. She asked whether I had had any dizziness, any nosebleeds, whether my periods had got heavier. Then she said, "I don't think it's anything, but I'd quite like to check your iron and your clotting, because three weeks is on the long side and you're telling me you bruise easily anyway. Is that all right?" And I said yes, and she booked the bloods, and that was the appointment. --- Four minutes. Possibly five. On the way out she said one other thing, without any particular weight, while looking at the screen and typing: "If you're doing anything where you get marks fairly often, no ibuprofen the day before. It'll make a real difference to how they look." I said thank you. I got as far as the car park before I had to sit in the car for a minute. --- I have thought a lot about why that undid me, and I think it is this. I had gone in braced to be a story. Somebody's difficult afternoon, somebody's concern, a case with a note attached. And what I got was a woman treating me as a body with a question about it, and giving me a piece of practical advice she would have given to anybody, and then moving on to her next patient. Nobody was interested. In the best possible way. My private life was, to that room, roughly as remarkable as playing hockey. The bloods came back fine, by the way. Iron slightly low, which explains a number of things about last winter. --- What I would say to anybody sitting with their thumb over the cancel button. They have heard it. Whatever you are about to say, they have heard something within about ten degrees of it, and probably that week. The embarrassment is a hundred per cent yours and none of it is theirs, which feels impossible right up until the moment you find out it is true. And the thing you are risking by not going is not embarrassment. It is finding out in six months that the thing you were too mortified to show anybody was the one that mattered. I have a friend who did exactly that with a lump, for eleven weeks, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything on this website and everything to do with the same instinct. Say the sentence fast. Put "and I'm fine" on the end if it helps. Then let them get on with their job. One more thing, which I only worked out afterwards. I had spent four days deciding how much to tell her, and the deciding was the exhausting part, and it was entirely wasted effort. What she needed was two facts: how long it had been there, and whether anybody was hurting me. Everything else I agonised over was context I had invented a requirement for. So work out your two facts. Say those. If she wants more she will ask, and if she asks it will be because it changes what she does next, which is the only reason a doctor ever asks anybody anything. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Health conditions and medication](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/health-and-medication/) - [Marks and bruising](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/marks-and-bruising/) - [Where it is safe to strike](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/guide/where-it-is-safe-to-strike/) - [Should I tell my GP or therapist?](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/questions/should-i-tell-my-doctor/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.