NHS nurse here. The one patient we all avoid. You won't believe why.

I have been an NHS nurse for over 15 years now. Seen everything. But there is one type of patient that makes every nurse on the ward groan. Not the demanding ones. Not the ones who ring the bell every five minutes. It is the ones who come in with something small, but they have already googled their symptoms and decided they are dying.

Last week, a young Nigerian man came in. He was holding his chest, looking like he was about to collapse. We rushed him to the front of the queue. Turns out he had indigestion. After we told him he was fine, he started arguing with us. He said we were not doing enough tests. He said he had read online that chest pain means heart attack. I had to sit him down and tell him, my brother, if you want to die, keep trusting Google. But if you want to live, trust the people who went to school for this.

It made me think about back home. In Nigeria, we do not have the luxury of googling every symptom. We go to the chemist, buy some malaria drugs, and carry on. Here, people have too much time and too much anxiety. They end up in A&E for things that paracetamol can fix. Na wa oh. Anyway, I don talk my own. Who else has a story of someone overreacting to a small thing?