“Right Back at Ya, Doc”

Once in a great while I make time to go to a doctor.  In truth, I have little faith that the doctors I visit are invested much farther than the money that they will be able to collect from my insurance agency.  Proof of that I find every time I have an appointment.

 

This afternoon’s appointment was pretty standard.

I walked into the doctor’s office a few minutes early. 

They asked my name, and then demanded proof of my identification.  I try not to take offense, I am after all in my later 50s and while unlikely, memory loss can be sufficient already in one of my years that I might have gotten my name wrong on walking in the door.

Immediately following that formality was the “proof of insurance” routine.  On this one there doesn’t seem to be any concern about what name it is, as long as there is a name and a card of some sort.

Then the pleasant gal behind the counter handed me a clipboard with “a couple of forms” that she needed me to fill out.

Twelve pages later, I had written and rewritten my name, address, and contact information no less than 18 times.  I had checked boxes that indicated that I wasn’t allergic to anything known to man, and that at 57 and male, I wasn’t pregnant and wasn’t planning on it.  Next was a list on which I certified that I had nothing from an Abdominal Aortic Aneurism to my lack of Zygomycosis. 

Oh, and before the Alzheimer’s that their ID process is apparently concerned about kicks in; why is the word “Abdominal” in front of Aortic Aneurism?  After all, since the Aorta only exists in the abdomen, the only way there could be a Non-Abdominal Aortic Aneurism is if the Aorta was no longer in your abdomen.  In which case I would think there might be one or two other priorities before having me checking a box about where the aneurism actually happened to be.

 

But I digress.  After turning the forms back over to the gal at the desk, I sit back down to wait.  Pleasingly, for only a very short while before a young assistant calls me out of the waiting room and escorts me into an examination room.  There she asked me if I wanted to keep my clothes on, or wanted to disrobe and put on a paper gown.  I could tell from her diminutive instructions on wearing the gown that she likely wouldn’t know how to deal with my telling her it wouldn’t bother me to strip down and stand there in the all-together.

I am nothing if not a man of my times.  We grew up rambling, running, and in that world, a bit of naked was nothing unusual.  Communal showers in the raw at school beginning in the 7^th grade, bathing in cold snow-melt lakes in the Sierras, and the general hazing of youth all conspired to eliminate my worries about someone seeing me naked.  Not my problem if they do.  True, I surely am not the physical specimen I once was, but still, not my problem.

 

In any case, after she takes her leave and I strip down and don the gown, the doctor walks in.  He looks older than the last I saw him, but I guess since the appointment clerk advised me that it had been 14 years, I guess he is due.

He asked if there was anything specific and I told him that; yes, it has been a while since I was here and I have some spots I figure you should look at”.  So he decides to do an over-all skin check.

He starts by picking up a comb and working over the hair on my head.  “Hmm”, He says, “there seems to be a scar up here in your hairline, how did you get that?”

“Oh, that was from a rock my scoutmaster beaned me with when I was about 17” I say.

“How about these two right up top here?” he asked.

“Those are from a rake along about 8 years old” I replied. 

I’ll shorten this up a bit; the next several answers were “Hatchet”,  “Wood carving tool”, “Drill bit”, “Table saw”, "T-post", "Broken glass", "Rusty sheet metal", "Barbed wire", "Barnacles" and “Nail gun” respectively.

The doctor looked at me pretty serious and said, "you really need to stop this, all this scar tissue is not good for your skin".  Then he touched a spot in the middle of my back and asked,  “And just exactly how did you get this one”.

I asked him if it was the straight one or the “L-shaped” one.

“L-shaped one about 2" on each side", he answered.

“Oh”, that one", I said, "you gave me that one the last time I saw you, Doc.”  

© Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved.