Doctor Doctoris . . .
I went to the doctor's last week.
I didn't really need to go for any particular reason, but my previous Vietnamese doctor moved to a distant part of the galaxy, and so I felt a little uneasy about not having a family doctor. I thought I'd better find a replacement.
In Canada, it's no easy feat to find a family doctor. Most of the young men and women who use up our university and hospital space to become doctors immediately head south to Texas or Florida as soon as they graduate, places where they can practice medicine and make a gazillion dollars rather than squander their fiscal lives under the strict controls of Canadian Medicare. The few that actually stay in Canada do so for a variety of other reasons, I suppose. For example, we seem to have a large number of Muslim doctors here.
Fortunately, I managed to find not one, but two available doctors. I decided to try both and see which might be more suitable for my particular needs.
The first was a very young man, certainly no more than 30 years old, who was just beginning his career. I liked his enthusiasm but not his idealism. He had no sooner introduced himself to me than he told me that he didn't prescribe anything remotely connected with narcotics, such as Tylenol 3. I've never had Tylenol 3 or anything remotely connected with narcotics, but I wondered if, say a tiger chewed off my hand, would my young doctor feel uneasy about prescribing something to dull the pain a little? Or would I have to invoke Tantric yoga postures to alleviate the agony?
And what about Arthritis? Colitis? Torn Achilles? Carpal-Tunnel Syndrome? Any of these might be a bit of an issue.
On to the second doctor.
The second was an older gentleman, about 60 years old, I suspect, with a very, very busy practice. When I arrived for my 10:30 appointment, the waiting room was already sold out, and I was shunted off to the standing room only section. I'm never sure why the concept of appointments escapes many doctors' offices. Some medical receptionists seem willing to book as many as ten patients into a particular time slot. What this does is create a backlog of patients, some coughing, some sneezing, a few wheezing, many wiping, and most griping about the wait. It's not a healthy situation.
I floated into this viral traffic jam with some dismay. At first, I almost asked to be rescheduled, but I had no real "patient status" as yet, so I decided to wait it out. In retrospect, that may have not been the best course of action.
After more than an hour's wait, I actually met the doctor, and I admit he was very nice. He talked about my family medical history, took notes, and then had me "hop up" onto the examining table where he checked my blood pressure and listened to my lungs. Neither seemed to impress him. I wanted to tell him that a slightly elevated blood pressure was possibly due to my impatience in the waiting room amidst a sea of microorganisms and bawling babies. The lungs? Well, who gets to smoke for 25 years without some capillary damage? You learn to live with it. Or die from it. Since, I'm still breathing, I figure what the hell? Nothing to make a fuss over.
The doctor seemed to agree. He hastily wrote out a form for some blood tests, told me to schedule a complete physical, and scurried off to the next examining room. I breathed a sigh of relief. This kind of medical practice was familiar to me. This kind of doctor was my kind of doctor. When you're in a perpetual state of denial about your health, you don't want a doctor who cares too much. There's no need to wake up all those dormant cancer cells after all. I returned to the receptionist and signed a form that ensured I would now have a "file" and would be able to return whenever I needed medical care.
And so, once again, I had a family doctor. The warm feeling of being connected to the medical arts spread through me like a good tonic. Except it was clearly not a tonic. In a mere twenty-four hours, I was crawling from my bed to the couch and back to my bed with a fever and aches and pains in every joint. I had contracted the waiting room flu.
My weekend plans fell apart as quickly as the colour drained from my face. Sympathetic phone calls roused me from my delirium, but generally I was falling asleep even before saying something like, "Oh, I'm fine. Don't worry. No need to come over and get sick too." And of course, no one came. Until yesterday.
By Sunday, Kid Blast was here to take me to a walk-in clinic.
"Wait," I pleaded with him through chapped and feverish lips. "I have a doctor. He's a kindly older gentleman. I'll see him tomorrow."
"No, you won't," the Kid said with a crooked smile. "Even if you managed to get an appointment, you'd be dead before you got through the waiting room."
So we breezed into a strip mall clinic, where there was no wait at all. When the doctor appeared in the doorway, I recognised him immediately as the very young doctor I had seen just days before. He was apparently moonlighting as a walk-in clinic practitioner to subsidise his Medicare controlled income. I'm not so sure he recognised me, possibly because he barely looked at me before saying, "Fever? Chills? Fatigue?"
"All of the above," I groaned.
"You have the flu," he concluded without so much as taking my temperature or sticking one of those inflated Popsicle sticks in my mouth. "Go home, drink lots of water, and sleep."
"But that's what I've been doing for four days," I moaned.
"Yes," he replied. "Do more of that."
He was hastily writing something, a billing code perhaps, on a yellow legal pad as he turned to leave.
"Wait," I croaked. "What about the pain? I can barely walk."
He hesitated in the doorway, pulled a pad from his lab coat pocket, turned to face me, and handed me a prescription.
"Here," he said. "These will help."
I looked down at the script and then up at him with a quizzical expression. "It's for Tylenol 3," he said flatly. "They should set you right in no time."
On the way home, I waved the prescription at Kid Blast and said, "If you see any tigers loose in the neighbourhood, don't worry. I've got it covered."
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