Here’s what’s up, Doc…

Like most men my age I don’t go to the doctor often enough.

Why should I? I’m fine.

The last time I paid a visit to my local learned disciple of Hippocrates was sometime last year when I had a panic attack. It had never happened before and with no experience I was concerned that I might be in the early throes of a heart thing. Not a heart attack. You know, just a “thing.”

It was very responsible of me. “Honey,” I told Carolann, “I think you should take me to the emergency room just to have this thing checked out.”

Aside from the fact that those hastily-spoken words cost me hundreds of dollars despite months of haggling with my insurance company, it was probably the most grownup thing I’ve done in decades.

It was only a panic attack. Twenty-nine people in my office had been fired that day. Go figure.

But, doctors need to understand something and if you know one personally, please do us all a favor and send him or her the following note:

Your holy Magnificence;

Mindful as I am of your superior breeding, social standing, intellect, training and anthropological evolution, I will make this as brief as possible. I am, of course, properly awed to be graced by your audience. As a mere mortal who has mindlessly placed my very life in your hands simply because you have a waiting room (EXCELLENT choice of name, by the way!) littered by the moaning, wheezing, coughing street denizens from Oliver!, and by the very impressive framed, yellow sheets of mumbo-jumbo accreditation posted on the wall nobody ever read, I beseech you:

Please remove the scale from the hall between your gatekeeper’s station and my holding cell, wherein I await you.

I am in your office because I’m sure that I have contracted cancer. Prostate, heart, throat, lung, stomach, hair or nails cancer — whichever it is, I’m sure I have one or more. (I work in the news business.) If not cancer, a malignant brain tumor. Or maybe I have something medical science hasn’t yet discovered. Terminal toe fungus, perhaps. The point is, I’m not visiting you and your insurance poltergeists just for my health.

You people scare the shit out of me and I know it’s by design.

But then you insist on conditioning me for Your Highness’s arrival. Protocol must be observed.

I am called forth from my leisurely repose in the company of the unwashed, looking at, but not actually reading, a six month old copy of Parenting magazine.

Your unholy Host hands me yet another clip board with still more pages to fill out, pages that require long answers handwritten into very short blank spaces. She bids me forth, into your lair. First, however, inevitably as death itself, I am ordered to stand on the scale.

I could be clutching an obviously broken arm, a compound fracture with bone protruding from my elbow; I might be spewing blood from an otherwise empty eye socket, and still you would need to know my weight.

WHY??

I’m sorry, Excellence. Guess I’m just a little self-consciousness.

I do note, however, that your big, professional, no doubt expensive scale inevitably registers me at fifteen pounds heavier than the one in my bathroom.

Nevertheless, I swallow that indignity and step into examination room 2 or 3. Sometimes 4, but that’s okay because you might already be in number 3! Or maybe you’re in number 5 and I have another hour to wait. Who knows? Not me. Nor, do I have a need to know! And certainly,  your staff isn’t troubled to take a wild guess.

And so, I sit… rising occasionally to examine the enlightening, if not fascinating, forty-year-old charts of the unisex human abdomen revealed in full — though, no doubt, inaccurate — color.

And then, suddenly, the ultimate indignity — your twenty-three year old female assistant, undersecretary nurse, or whatever the hell she is, enters and tells me to strip to my waist so that I might sublimate myself to await your esteemed arrival.

She leaves me to my privacy. She gives me a pleasant smile.

It’s not a personal smile. It’s nothing at all like the “checking you out!” smiles I got from twenty-three-year-old women when I was twenty-six. It’s a smile like my granddaughter might give me if she had just met me for the first time in her life and thought I smelled funny.

She leaves, closing the door before I gather the presence of mind to ask, “When you say strip to the waist, do you mean from the top down or from the bottom up?” At my age I can’t ask a twenty-three-year-old girl something like that, anyway. I’ll wait for you, Herr Doktor!

And I wait. And I wait some more.

I want to phone my wife for support but there is no cell service here.

I peek inside the drawers. Very long q-tips; ancient, barbaric looking instruments which have uses I can’t imagine.

I play with the pump on the wall-mounted blood pressure monitor which is never used because you have newer, better ones in the bottom drawer, purchased at CVS Pharmacy.

I don’t mind that the issues of Sports Illustrated in your examination rooms are eight months old. I never read them in the first place. I’ll start now, as I conscientiously forget about my terminal earlobe cancer.

Finally, you arrive!

The door fairly bursts from it’s insignificant hinges in your ethereal presence!

“Mr. Williams!” you boom, thrown into an unearthly relief of backlit brilliance. “How are we today?”

I begin to stammer that “we” are fine but I never quite get the words past my trembling, genuflecting lips.

“I see you still haven’t lost that weight,” you intone, with a wink and a flash of a teasing smile. But I know the underlying prognosis is terminal. I’m going to die very soon because I’m fat. You told me that the last time I was here and now you’re reminding me as gently and cruelly as possible. My fault. My bad. I haven’t lost weight and now I shall die.

By the time you’ve looked in my wax-impacted ears, my decay-laden, bad-breath mouth and my relentlessly bloodshot, darting eyes…

I have no idea why I came in here to begin with.

I just want to go home. Now.

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Author: Dave Williams

Dave Williams is a radio news/talk personality originally from Sacramento, now living in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Carolann. They have two sons and grandsons living in L.A.

9 thoughts on “Here’s what’s up, Doc…”

  1. don’t feel bad Anita, HE hasn’t gone in yet! This is all speculation that he does so he won’t go in. Even though his ears have hurt now for weeks. It is a simple water cleaning procedure but he makes a mountain out of it. LOL Don’t encourage him.
    Get your butt in there dear and get it fixed.
    Your loving wife.

  2. ooooh – I love jumping right into the middle of this one. Yes – DEAR – get your butt in there and see the doctor. Hugs to you Carolann for keeping after him.

  3. Geez, I was just trying to be funny. It’s amazing how many people have written to me thinking I was angry about doctors being so imperious. I just thought it was a funny essay. Dave Barry-like.

  4. Definition: Being misunderstood or misconstrued – a sure sign you’ve arrived as a creative person.

  5. I get it…I laughed! But…I’ve been in the medical industry too long…and a patient too many times…not to recognize the underlying truth in what you say that makes us all shudder a little. One piece of advice…GO! I wouldn’t be among you today if I hadn’t gone in to have something insignificant checked out. Its not finding the Cancer that matters…its finding it in time to do something about it that matters. Fortunately, ear pain is seldom a sign of cancer…however, I have included a Website reference that is sure to scare the bejeebees out of you. Love you and miss seeing you and your beloved…Gloria

    http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/sym/earache.htm

  6. trust me it is ear wax. We go through this every year. And he waits till he has to go to the emergency room because he must hate doctors so much! I guess I would too if when I walked into the room the doctor says “gees your fat!” that would have me not going again…. bless his heart I should get myself a water blaster like the doctor and sit on him and do it myself! anyone want to help me?

  7. Well, I got it. And it was “Barry, Barry” funny. Good stuff, pal.

    Meanwhile …

    I’d suggest you try and enjoy the minor inconveniences we’re faced with these days when going through that scheduled doctor’s appointment. I say “enjoy it” because once this current administration sets their socialized healthcare plan on the road to mandatory participation, with fines, fees and demanded taxes for non-compliance … the old days of going through what you describe in your amusing piece will feel like a day at The Magic Kingdom.

    To be sure, all this won’t occur right away, but over time … employers currently offering workers a health plan will be dropping their private coverage and (later) directing their employees to “go sign up with the government.” When all that happens … the old horse in the barn above will have left the building along with Elvis. Or a least one of his cousins.

    As my wise ol’ momma used to say: “Son, elections have consequences.” And she was right because “now” … we IS one.

    Mr. Williams? The doctor will see you now. : – )

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