A Lighter View
Medical mayhem
By K.E.H. Stagg

July 9, 2009

I am convinced that every practitioner of medicine is a torturer at heart. No doubt this sounds extreme, but review with me the successive humiliations heaped on those of us undergoing routine annual check-ups and see if you don’t agree with me--in spite of yourself.

First of all, I have to arrive at the office a week before my scheduled visit because the insurance industry requires doctors to treat patients at the speed of light. If I blink, I’ve missed my appointment, and that will be $125, please.

Of course, my children will have graduated from college before I ever get to see the doctor, and I don’t even have children yet! I sit in the waiting room, wondering if the person with kennel cough is contagious and mentally review when I last had my distemper and gamma globulin injections.

After signing a thousand papers which assure me the doctor’s office isn’t going to sell my name to a telemarketing firm because of HIPPA rules, I am summoned by someone I will call Helga (in order to protect her true identity), who is loud enough to be heard in another state. She ushers me down the hall to a meat-packing scale. C’mon. This isn’t over-eaters anonymous, for crying out loud! Helga screams out the total poundage so that spies in Russia are asking each other, “Iss det kilos? Nyet, iss pounds. How many rubles iss one pound?”

Once the humiliation of knowing I weigh more than the maximum allotted elevator limit is past, I am escorted to a room where I’m instructed to don a paper bag with a string fastener. The garb creates a draft like a NASCAR vehicle, because these paper “clothes” don’t actually close. It’s just another dose of humiliation so that anyone unlucky enough not to be sedated for their annual check-up gets to see just what gravity does to human skin when I creep down the hall to provide a specimen.

After looking at all the scary charts on the wall and memorizing the symptoms that accompany intestinal polyps, I can’t stop myself from feeling a bit irregular, the first indicator of colon cancer. I also can’t help wondering if being in an office with ill people is such a good idea. Clearly, there’s nothing all that wrong with me, and just about the time I have to decide which part of Medicare to sign up for, the doctor whisks into the room mid-sentence. Because it’s not clear if he’s talking to me or finishing a conversation with the previous patient, I say nothing.

He has a 2x4 and other instruments I know better than to believe are innocent, and warns that I might feel “a little pressure” as he begins prodding and poking, a signal that things are about to get excruciatingly painful. I’m not wrong. He twists my arm out of its socket and then rips off my kneecap, asking, “Which hurts more: one or two?” When the tears have stopped streaming down my face and I suggest perhaps two is more painful, he shoves bamboo skewers under my fingernails and sets them on fire, asking, “Which hurts worse: two or three?” After I stop screaming, I beg him to euthanize me on the spot. He scribbles something in hieroglyphs on my chart. Although it’s about me—it is, after all, my chart—he acts astonished when I ask what he wrote. He says what sounds exactly like, “Your discombobulator detaches when your dorsal anterior medium extrapolates.”

When I ask for the diagnosis in common English words of two syllables or less, he does a mental eye roll and says with exaggerated patience, “You have an itch.” He ticks a couple of boxes on a form, tells me to get a prescription filled at my pharmacy for a cream that will cost me $500 per application, but will definitely cure my discombobulator, and leaves me to totter out to the receptionist where I hand over $125 in gratitude for making good my escape.

In my opinion, doctors are sadists. But since I’m related to several members of the medical profession, I may be biased.