I'm Strong to the Finish, when I Eats Me Spinach

Is it just me or are all GPs useless? Cue my rant:

Every time I visit my GP I wonder how the hell he’s managed to keep his job for so long. Instead of looking at you while you speak, he stares at the computer. This is no exaggeration. Recalling my last visit to him, I think the only time he looked at me was to give me my prescription. It’s quite worrying to be honest because he doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in patients so if I had personal problems I would be reluctant to discuss them with him. But saying all that, he’s the perfect doctor compared to his colleague.

I had an appointment with her today about my INR. My blood is clotting too quickly (the level is 1.6) and that’s very dangerous for someone in my position because I’m at a big risk of a stroke as the blood can clot on my mechanical heart valve; and that clot can travel to the brain. Now the usual way doctors and nurses calculate how much medicine I need to take is with a computer. Simple? Not for this specific doctor I saw today. She seemed to think calculating it by a chart would be better than the computer. That made me cautious but I thought, hey, she’s the doctor after all. She then said I should come back tomorrow. TOMORROW?! It’s an emergency considering how low my blood is and she wants me to wait a day? I then told her exactly how to open the program on the computer to calculate the dosage, but she didn’t trust me. In the end I asked for my original doctor to calculate it and ring me back. Which he did. Thank god. He might not look at me but at least he knows what he’s doing! It’s quite scary to think these people are in control of my anti-coagulation levels...

In terms of why my INR is so low...I'm not sure. It's been stable for the last month or so, and the only thing I can think of is that I had spinach two days ago. Apparantly it's high in Vitamin K, which interacts with my medicine and causes the blood to clot quicker...Damn...I better be more careful from now on. I also learnt that if your heart beats very rapidly then there is a risk of a clot forming. This little piece of information has torn apart my plans for sky diving next year. God damn it...what a rubbish day.