An audience with Saint Nichola

the wonder GP.

In a lifetime, you only ever meet a handful of truly special people.
A teacher who unearths something in you that you never knew existed (I mean something useful, as opposed to a natural ability for pyromania or wolf whistling).
A friend who remains your friend beyond distances, trends and social class tribulations.
A politician who triggers in you an irrepressible need to vote for him/her in the next election, and doesn't totally let you down (just mostly lets you down).
A presumed adversary who turns out to be working toward the same goal as you.
A traffic warden who rips your parking ticket to shreds with a laugh and saunters off gaily*

And then there is Dr Nichola.

She is the living person I know I'd be most tempted to put forward for canonization, had I not burned my bridges with Pope Benedict XVI during our first meeting (a WWII joke was never going to be a good idea...**)

You see, Nichola is no ordinary person.
When meeting her for the first time, you realise that she was always meant to be a doctor, and that she became a doctor because, are you ready for this, her ambition in life was to heal people. (!!!)

That's it. She's a healer, first and foremost.
She has been our GP for years (thank you Ciaran, I'm forever indebted to you) and Nichola is a most unusual doctor in the sense that you know instinctively that money or status were secondary (possibly tertiary) considerations in her decision to become a doctor.

You know that scene in Crocodile Dundee (classic taste I have), no not the one when he takes out the massive knife and says to the New York girl "a knife? that's not a knife, this is a knife" - the other scene when there is a massive buffalo blocking the road and he does this weird hand gesture with the thumb and little finger spread out and the buffalo calms down and let's them go to the waterfall where the New York girl strips down to that great swimming suit?
Well she can do it with my kids! (not the stripping down to a swimming suit part). Nichola can pacify my put-a-wild-buffalo-to-shame kids, without even a weird twisty fingers gesture.

They pick on it, with their usually malevolent little antennae. When they are with Dr. Nichola, they are in the presence of greatness.
Simple, no bullshit, healing greatness.

Thank you Nichola.

I forgive you for declaring me officially obese.

* there is always a part of fantasy in Raheny_Eye entry. I just can't help it...
** "I know about suffering, Bennie, my granddad died in a concentration camp. /sorrowful pause/ He fell from a watch tower while shooting at an escapee and broke his neck..."