Christina Patterson: Poor patient care is a bitter pill to swallow

"So, you've had a mastectomy," said the plastic surgeon. I glanced down at my breasts, which were still there. No, I hadn't, unless I'd been even more forgetful than usual, had a mastectomy. But I'd been told that I'd need one. The lumpectomy on my left breast hadn't quite cut the mustard, and more drastic action was needed. I was here to talk to Mr C about options for reconstruction.

Mr C was clearly tired. No, he told me, he wasn't going to "rush round" getting me samples of his work. As topics of conversation go, he implied, the reconstruction of the female mammary gland lacked excitement. My approach, he told me, was "a bit heavy". Much heavier, I'm sure, than his would have been to the excision of his gonads, but I never got to find out. Time had run out, and he was a busy, busy man.

It was probably a bit more upsetting than the moment, a few weeks before, when I'd glimpsed a referral note, written by the doctor who had just told me I had cancer, saying that I was "over-anxious". The appropriate response, presumably, is just to keep smiling. Like the friend of mine whose doctor informed him that he surely didn't need anti-depressants because he was "always so cheerful". Er, yes. Good things come in small (and sometimes blistered) packages.

Luckily, my friend, thanks in part to the little white pills, is still smiling and I, thanks to a second operation by a heroic doctor, and the retention of much of my left breast, am, at least some of the time, too. I don't know if Mr C is continuing to upset women with cancer on a daily basis. I don't know if, like me, he was lucky enough to transform his passion (in my case writing, in his case hacking off the secondary sexual organs of vicious bitches) into his profession. I only know that if there had been a forum inviting me to assess his performance, I would certainly have felt it was my duty – and, yes, pleasure – to do so.

Well, now there is. It's called www.Iwantgreatcare.org, a warts-verrucas-and-all website which aims to offer patient feedback on the country's 40,000 GPs and 120,000 hospital doctors. Started by a bitter patient? One, perhaps, of the 16 patients last year who underwent surgery on the wrong site? No, actually, it was started by Dr Neil Bacon, a renal specialist in Oxford. And his colleagues are up in (scrubbed, green-sleeved) arms. "It's unfair," says Dr Richard Vautrey, from the BMA, "that patients posting comments are anonymous and that the information is subjective".

Subjective? What, you mean like the kind of assessments that artists, writers, musicians, chefs, sportsmen and, for that matter, journalists, receive, in the media, and on the internet, every day? Anonymous? Like the reviews of books, restaurants, hotels and holidays that are launched into cyberspace by anyone who can string a sentence together – and many who can't?

Honestly, you'd almost think that this was a profession that regarded itself as in some way separate from society and its petty demands, a profession which thought that "flexibility" was a concept that applied to patients' time, but not, obviously, to its own, a profession which saw the word "modernising" as a synonym (and rightly, on the evidence of the past few years) for a whacking great pay-rise. A profession, in fact, which regarded its "customers" (who pay their salaries) with contempt.

There are, of course, many wonderful, kind, conscientious doctors. Mr Kissin, at the Royal Surrey County, and Dr Mair, at Barts, that's you. And yes, I'll put that on the blog.

If you have tears...

One of the most embarrassing public events I've ever witnessed was Germaine Greer crying. It was at the South Bank, and the event, unfortunately, was organised by me. "I don't care who you are," she hissed, when I tried to introduce myself in the green room. Clearly, she was saving her energy for the spectacle that would follow: not quite the account of culture and exile that I was expecting, but a full-on crying jag for the Aboriginal brethren she had left behind.

Perhaps it's good, then, that Greer has a new object of pity: herself. Yes, a female playwright has had the temerity to write a play, The Female of the Species, about a woman bearing certain similarities to the plain-speaking feminist academic. Greer has described it as "threadbare". She also says she hasn't read it.

* There is, of course, no reason on this planet why any sane person should give a flying fig leaf about the pre-conjugal tiffs of a publicity-hungry MP and his unfortunate young fiancée. No reason at all, except that the entire spectacle has been force-fed to the nation, from its inception on a TV talent show to the breathless revelations (in Hello!, of course) of the grand proposal at the Trevi fountain and, now, news of a rift. The ghastly truth is that the Transylvanian popster might even have thought that Lembit Opik, the man for whom she wrote the musical masterwork "Text Me I Love You", might be a proper contender in British public life and not an asteroid-fearing, celeb-worshipping, jaw-jutting champion of the Caravan Club, whose every pronouncement seems to confirm his status as Britain's silliest politician. An awful lot gets lost in translation, including all those tiny hints – linguistic, visual and tonal – that your chosen one is a total, utter, excruciating, nerd.

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