Mar 19 2009
Doctor Who?
No, not that Doctor Who ~ (I love the show - hope it comes back on soon). I’m talking about the ones we have to go to occasionally when we get the creeping crud or some nasty little virus.
After an interminable wait in the waiting room where you have been coughed on, sneezed at, and touched repeatedly by someone else’s snotty little kid, you get to go back to the exam rooms where you can sit on the table with the sticky paper and wait for another 30 minutes. While you wait, you hear the sounds in the hallway ~ some kid screaming, the office girls discussing where to get lunch, and the doctor on the phone making a golf date.
When the man finally comes into the room, what’s the first dumb thing he says? “How are WE today?” Well, I don’t know how you are, Doc, but if I was in great shape I wouldn’t be here, now would I?
“What kind of complaints do we have today?”
Same kind I always have ~ the bitchy, cynical kind. Your magazine collection sucks; it would be nice if the TV set had on something cheerful instead of CNN; and could you teach your office staff that smiling now and then won’t crack their makeup. Other than that, I dragged myself over here, feeling like crap, so you can write me some prescriptions that I can’t afford to get filled, plus I want to make sure you can afford your Porsche payment this month. (Bless their hearts, ya gotta love ‘em ~ most of them worked hard to get to the point where they could afford their own clinic.)
The following items actually came from real Doctor’s notes on real patients’ charts:
1) On the second day the knee was better, and on the 3rd day it disappeared completely.
2) The patient has been depressed ever since she started seeing me in 1993.
3) The patient has no past history of suicides.
4) While in the ER, she was examined, x-rated and sent home.
5) Patient stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.
6) Patient has two teen-aged children, but no other abnormalities.
7) Patient had no shaking chills, but her husband said she was hot in bed last night.
In all seriousness, many Doctors get blamed for things they have no control over. They are, after all, human ~ and humans must be regulated by some governmental forces ~ otherwise, they would just continue to do logical things for humanitary reasons and even resort to using tried-and-true remedies from the olden days, instead of being encouraged to push drugs for all the pharmaceutical companies.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if real-life physicians were like Dr. House, or the bed-hopping bunch on Grey’s Anatomy? How about that scalpel-happy plastic surgeon on Nip Tuck ?
For the time being, most of us still get to choose what doctor we want to see, but that may not last much longer either. So, how are WE feeling today?
