A little bit about my GP, who I think is wonderful and a solid standard for how to work with a patient with health anxiety.

First of all, I credit another awful GP with helping to kickstart my health anxiety. I was having lower abdominal pain for a long time before I was diagnosed with IBS. It tended to concentrate on where my left ovary would be and I was terrified of it being sinister.

When I went to this first GP, she wouldn't believe that the pain had been going on that long and I wasn't on the pill "so there was no reason anything would have developed" on my ovaries, which naturally seemed to me like a brush off. She kept saying it would go away. It didn't.

I got all the usual things. Eventually she suggested it might be IBS and then said "drink more peppermint tea." I developed gastritis from all the worry so now I had upper abdominal pain as well as lower. I became obsessed with the idea that something terrible was going on.

It took me breaking down in tears six months after I started seeing her about this abdominal pain for her to send me for an ultrasound and blood tests. Fortunately, everything came back clear and that's when she decided I probably had IBS.

Finally, she gave me medication that might help and a proper diet plan to help me narrow down what was triggering it (as it turns out, who knows what triggers it - different every time except for cabbage).

A couple of years later and still struggling with anxiety with a dose of depression in the mix now too, the pain came back. Worked myself into a tizz again. Had to go see this new GP in my home town and was ready to go into battle to be taken seriously like I hadn't been before.

Reader, she was magnificent. She went through the history of my abdominal pain with me, calmly explained what might be happening, how my anxiety was affecting it (and other symptoms by this point), booked me for an ultrasound straight away to make sure there was nothing else.

Whenever I go to her with anything now, she's always reassuring, even when I've got my own outlandish theories on what might be happening. She's never just said "oh it's your weight" or brushed me off in any way. She takes my anxiety seriously.

And it's taken the terror out of going to see a doctor about something. Which I know is a luxury that other people have and I'm so grateful to have found one that takes me seriously. But also knows when to make a joke.

Her: "I don't think it's anything serious and it's not what you googled, but we could send you for a blood test to double-che... actually, let's just send you for the blood test and then we're definitely sure and you won't fret."

"Also, we need to check your vitamin D levels to make sure you haven't slid back into vampirism."

As I said, magnificent.

This ended up being a little longer than intended, but this is why we need to keep the NHS, why it can't be turned over to pharma and insurance companies. It's not a business and it never should be.