TL;DR I ranted at my doctor. I may have gotten some progress.

My doctor is a really nice guy. I like him a lot. He didn't deserve my visit the other day but he's also the face of the NHS and in that role he is there to take some of my frustration at the lack of care given to my health over the years.

I have two long term chronic health problems. My eczema and my sleep pattern.

Right now I have a bunch of complications driven by the stress I've found myself under, over the last two years particularly. On a monthly basis the work in my life seems to get more and more with no sign of letup. In my personal life various things have occurred that mean on an almost monthly basis I have found out even more about what a lying cheating whore my ex is while she "sweetly" tries to negotiate with me an exit for our legal entanglements.

Last weekend I broke. I broke badly. The "sweet" ex decided the best way to help me with this was to make up some story about how she'd reported me to the police for abusive behaviour against her, including that I had invited around specifically "a person with known violent behaviour when drunk" to get drunk with me. This person has been drunk here many a time and shown no violent tendencies, because any tendencies he may have had were related to emotional circumstances at the time. He's also probably my closest friend right now, so he was here because I knew he could quite happily listen to me rant without making comment or judgement.

The "report" was based on me sitting within earshot of her while ranting. I'd just found out that every word she has said since this process started two years ago has been a blatant bare faced lie. I was ever so slightly upset at the over £6,000+ I have spent on legal and financial advice to try and sort this process out over the last two years. To say nothing of the money I have invested in the house itself. If we sell I get nothing. If we sell she get's little and likely doesn't cover her original deposit.

So it's beneficial for us to play nice isn't it? Instead she carries on her illicit relationship and extends it, now infecting the entire house. This is where my head is right now. You don't want to know anything about her actual relationship, because I've recently learnt more about that that makes it even more scary and I can only conclude she is living in some fantasy world, hence the continuous lies even when they don't benefit her.

This is what my doctor was facing me trying to explain in under 10 minutes. And the big problem being none of the above is what I wanted to talk to him about. It's just some background.

So I started discussing what I believe is an underlying problem of mine and has been my whole life. It's just like my eczema in that respect.

My parents were told when I was 3 months I'd grow out of my eczema, when I was 3-4 years old I was told I would grow out of my eczema by my teens, when I was a teenaager I was told I would grow out of my eczema it's a teenage thing... You see the pattern. The same with my weight. Yes he'll put on weight when he's a teen, he'll put on weight when he's a young adult, he'll start to fill out when he's 25. Oh middle age, that's definitely got to do it. I have recently been consuming alcohol and food at a rate that means I should have a world class gut right now. Nope, still 57 kg. I am now middle aged (and pretty healthy according to my recent inspection)

So this is genetics. It's not my lifestyle, it's not I don't eat enough, it's me, just get used to it.

There's another thing that seems to be part of my genetics and that's my circadian rythym. It's a bit laggy. No, it's a lot laggy. If you let me run 3 hours behind everyone else I seem to do okay, things seem to occur normally. The problem is when you're trying to conform to a 9-5 style lifestyle it doesn't really fit. Your 9am meeting is a 6am meeting from my body's point of view. I spend my life working as if I had a 6 hour jet lag to contend with every day.

I believe I suffer from a delayed sleep phase type circadian rythym sleep disorder. The only way to prove it that I have found, till recently? Prove you don't have any other kind of sleep disorder.

Have you ever tried to convince a doctor to spend a bunch of resources on a bunch of tests that are all going to come back negative. It's not easy.

So a year ago when I went to the doctor over some major sleep issues I was having at the time I presented them some information on DSPD (Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder) just as an "I'd like to investigate this sometime, do you know anything about it?" at the end of the appointment. They took it, read it, filed it. No more than I expected at the time.

So I'm broken, sat in the doctor's office, I've summarised as much of the above as I can in ten minutes while being in a state where my thoughts are all over the place and there are so many possible places to diverge off into more detail (It was only about half an hour previously that I'd had the dawning realisation about how much my ex had been lying to me).

He turns and says so we just need to sort the stress. I exploded at him verbally. I screamed something along the lines of if all you can offer me is a 5mg valium as a short term chemical fix then you are fucking useless to me and I am wasting my time here. He then asked what I'd do and I said go home and continue to self medicate using alcohol as a sedative because I've read the data on valium and I've read the data on alcohol and it basically comes down to one is socially acceptable and the other isn't.

If you can give me a short term fix with some promise to actually fucking listen to the data I'm trying to present to you then we might get somewhere and I know we haven't had time to deal with this here, I said it when I booked the appointment, it was also the first thing I said to you as I walked through the door, I kept stopping myself part way through things because I knew we had no chance of delving into it any deeper and here you are saying well that's it time's up. No.

So he asked me what the diagnosis was and what the treatment was. This again made me explode with I'm not the fucking medical professional but I can see one simple fix if this is the case and that's just simply some medical acknowledgment of I'm not pathologically lazy I'm just permanently jet lagged. That's something I can take to my employer and maybe we can all benefit and maybe my stress will reduce (ya know not being jet lagged all the time) and maybe my eczema will improve and my diet as I'll be consuming foods when it wants to eat not when I'm forcing it to eat.

So he said okay what about if I give you enough valium to get you through to next Tuesday which is the next earliest appointment I can book you in for and I shall go and read up some more on this.

Thank you.