'I Hadn't Seen a Doctor in Twelve Years': One Peterhead Fisherman's Story

Davie has been working the boats out of Peterhead for most of his adult life. He's in his mid-fifties, broad-shouldered, the kind of man who fixes things with whatever's to hand and gets on with it. When he first spotted the Vibrant Health Advocates table set up near the fish market one Tuesday morning last winter, his instinct was to keep walking.

"I thought it was one of those things where they hand you a leaflet and tell you to eat more broccoli," he says, with a dry laugh. "I wasn't interested in that. I had work to do."

What made him stop was that one of the health advocates called him by name. They'd met briefly before — not in a health context, just around the harbour. That familiarity was enough. He stopped. He had a brief conversation. And when the advocate asked, almost in passing, whether he'd mind having his blood pressure checked while he was there, he shrugged and said yes.

The reading gave both of them pause. His blood pressure was significantly elevated — high enough that the advocate gently but clearly explained that it was something he needed to follow up on with his GP. Davie remembers the moment well: "He didn't alarm me, but he was straight with me. He said, look, this is a number that tells us something isn't right. You need to get this looked at properly."

The honest part, Davie admits, is that he hadn't seen a doctor in twelve years. Not because of any particular fear or aversion — just because nothing had ever felt urgent enough to bother with. He's healthy-looking, physically active, never short of energy on the boat. It hadn't occurred to him that anything might be quietly wrong.

He did book an appointment. His GP confirmed the elevated blood pressure and identified a secondary concern with his cholesterol. He was started on medication. Six months on, both readings are well within normal range. His GP told him that, left unmanaged, the readings he'd had in that initial check could have significantly raised his risk of stroke or heart attack within a few years.

Davie is philosophical about it now, though the weight of that information hasn't entirely left him. "I'm fine, and that's good," he says. "But I keep thinking — if I'd walked past that table, I'd have no idea. I'd still be walking around thinking I was grand."

He's spoken to a few of the younger lads on his crew since then, passing on the same casual encouragement the health advocate gave him: stop when you see the table, let them take the reading, it takes five minutes and it costs you nothing. Two of them have done exactly that.

That ripple effect — one conversation prompting another — is at the heart of what Vibrant Health Advocates – Apollo is trying to build in Peterhead. Not a campaign, not a programme in the formal sense, but a shift in the unwritten rules of what it means to look after yourself when you're a man in a working harbour town. Davie's story is one of dozens. Each one starts the same way: someone stopping, even briefly, when they might have kept walking.

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