Cruel COVID killed my angelic GP

A saintly doctor for 50 years and a hero for tackling my hypochondria

Many speak of the COVID jab as an oddly emotional experience, and so it was this week for me.

It wasn’t solely the relief, or bemused delight about this country – which for ages has seemed incapable of tying its shoelaces without slapstick disaster – rediscovering a measure of competence.

Incited along with the immune response was a stab of poignancy about those for whom it came too late.

A year earlier, almost to the day, I’d had two conversations at opposing ends of the Covid-aware spectrum.

One was with a sweet, septuagenarian, ultra-orthodox rabbi at the Turkish baths, who was unconcerned about the virus because ‘Hashem [God] will protect me.’ One week later, Hashem having gone AWOL, it killed him.

The other, over the phone, was with my private doctor. Dr Julian Muir took the threat more seriously, silently mulling for a while when asked if I should extract my nephew from my parents’ house.

‘It’s a tough call,’ he finally said, ‘but well worth considering. We know very little about this virus, but it’s clearly a brute for the old.’

Dr Muir was by no means old. He was 71 and, with his irksomely full head of hair, could have passed for a decade younger. But he too died from COVID in late January.

Presumptuous as it must seem to claim grief about someone with whom I spent a few hours each year, Julian was an enchanting man and an extraordinary doctor. And I, frankly, was an extraordinary patient.

‘Apologies in advance but I’m your worst nightmare,’ I introduced myself some 20 years ago.

‘And why is that?’ he said with the knowing smile of one who’s seen it all down the decades.

‘I may be the worst hypochondriac on the planet.’

He grinned again.

‘I imagine I’ll cope.’ I’d already assumed that he’d be to my medical tastes, from the 49 minutes passed with the antique Spectators in the fusty waiting room round the corner from Harrods.

It wasn’t just that he loved to talk. Good doctors (albeit this is no option in an urban NHS surgery) take oodles of time.

They bring a faux languor to their work, listening with well-disguised intentness for opaque clues that won’t be picked up in a rigidly timed appointment. They bring something like artistry to their science.

Once, after he’d binned the latex glove and promised me it wasn’t what I thought, I asked if he was equally reassuring with the less ostentatiously demented.

He leaned forward and placed a firm hand on each knee. ‘I need you to understand this. Whenever I’m with you, right at the forefront of my mind is the boy who cried wolf.’

Along with his uncanny diagnostic gifts, he had the quality you wish for but do not find in every physician. He radiated humanity.

The eclectic range of topics covered during our consultations, and over several lunches, included politics, food, troublesome builders encountered in his alternative career as a property developer, and holidays in Chile with his golden, fast-growing family.

And, occasionally, he’d talk about patients with more serious conditions than any he lived to unearth in me.

When I asked after his 84-year-old with lung cancer, he grimaced and his eyes clouded with pain when he reported that it had done for her.

He had mentioned a middle-aged guy with a huge oesophageal tumour, saved by the surgery he fought tigerishly to persuade a reluctant surgeon to perform. The eyes misted with distress again when he said the cancer had fatally resurfaced elsewhere.

‘He had seven good years he wouldn’t have had but for you,’ I consoled.

‘Mm,’ he said, ‘of course that is something. But…’

The youngest medic known ever to have qualified in Britain, at an outlandish 21 years and 305 days, he’d been a doctor for a full half-century without becoming hardened to the agonies the job entailed.

The only two slips he ever made were not activating the ‘number withheld’ function when he rang from his mobile, and buying a house in west London a seven-minute walk from mine.

‘I hereby swear a solemn oath that I will never pitch up at your door in a panic,’ I told him, ‘after 11pm.’

‘You’re welcome at any time,’ he graciously replied, ‘so long as it’s a time when I’m at our place in Hampshire.’

I must have irritated the hell out of him, but he never showed it. Whether the medical issue raised was very grave on another’s behalf, or straddled the borderline with the certifiable on mine, his gentle concern was as tangible as his talent and expertise.

‘I’ll have a look when you’re next in, but I’m not worried,’ he said during a typically demented call about the emergence of a new bone in my mouth. ‘I suspect you’re having one of your wobbles.’

I’m having another one now as I imagine a future without Dr Julian Muir. He will be endlessly missed, and never replaced.

‘ Whenever I’m with you, at the forefront of my mind is the boy who cried wolf ’