"A doctor," I gasped. "I have to see a doctor. What time do you close?"
   "Seven o'clock," she said.
   "Thank God," I said. "I think I'm dying."
   "No," she countered. "It's 20 to seven and there are two people waiting. You can't see the doctor."

"But my own doctor has shut for the day," I protested, pausing as a cough which sounded like a shovelful of gravel landing in a steel bucket wracked my body. That's what I find so endearing about medical receptionists - the ill-concealed delight they take in exercising their power to shut the door against a man on the verge of terminal bronchitis and send him gagging and wheezing into the night.

   "There's a 24-hour medical centre in the next suburb," she said as I lurched out of the surgery. "You might try there."
   "I hope your hair falls out," I muttered. It wasn't much of a comeback but I was not at my peak.

There may be more depressing places than 24-hour medical centres but I would rate them up there in the top ten along with hospitals, funeral parlours, train stations on public holidays, and bank queues. I walked in and looked around at the walls lined with grey-faced people, all staring straight ahead. Some of them looked near death, others as if they had passed beyond the great divide several hours earlier and had been left propped against the wall while the staff looked for a suitably sized coffin.

A young woman sat in one corner crying, while in another a child screamed and in yet another a very old man sat and grinned at me and nodded. I nodded back but he kept nodding and grinning at his own hugely amusing private joke. I realised suddenly that I was in the valley of the damned. I wanted to run out the door but was too sick. I didn't need a doctor, just a prescription. Two lines are needed at medical centres, an express lane for people who know what's wrong with them and another for the rest.

So I sat and waited and wheezed and watched the sad procession of humanity that shuffled and limped through the door. Occasionally, a doctor would appear in one of the many doorways opening off both sides of the room and call a name, causing one of the corpses along the wall to suddenly jerk into life. Sometimes no-one would answer the call and I desperately wanted to yell in the silence that followed the calling of their names: "They died waiting. They've just been wheeled out. Can I have their spot? It was their dying wish that I get their spot in the queue. Honestly."

I was afraid, however, that if I did this I would again be thrown out into the dark of night and left to slowly wheeze to death in the car park.

I spent 90 minutes reading seven-year-old copies of New Idea, three minutes telling the doctor I was getting bronchitis and needed an antibiotic prescription really, really quickly, and five minutes parting with $60 for the experience. "You'll get $30 back on Medicare," beamed the receptionist, smiling as if she had just told me I'd won Lotto and appearing miffed when I failed to do cartwheels around the waiting room on hearing the joyous news.

Clutching my prescription I walked next door to the pharmacy, handily placed within crawling distance for those people who had waited so long to see a doctor that their limbs had atrophied. I handed over the script and asked for some day-and-night cold tablets to go with the antibiotics.

   "The blue ones are the night ones and they make you sleep. Don't drink alcohol with them," said the pharmacist.
   "Thanks for the warning," I said, making a mental note to wash them down with half a bottle of red the moment I walked through the door of my apartment.

I left with antibiotics, cold tablets, two tubes of Berocca multivitamin tablets and a packet of throat lozenges. Bronchitis-wise, I was fully loaded. That was a week ago and I have now stopped doing gravel-in-the-bucket noises.