My Day At the Doctor

I went to the doctor the other day and received some terrible news. It came as quite a shock because, while I had not been feeling great — I was running a slight fever and I had the sniffles — I felt pretty good for a guy my age. So to hear my doctor tell me that I needed immediate and radical surgery I was sent for a bit of a loop.

I asked him what the surgery entailed and he told me he didn’t know as he’d never read about it. I sarcastically asked if he intended to read about it before he cut me open and performed this radical surgery on me and he told me he wouldn’t bother because it would be too complicated for him to understand, anyway. I asked him what was wrong with me and he told me I had the sniffles and a slight temperature. I asked him what massive radical surgery would do to help cure my cold and he said, “well, doing nothing isn’t going to cure it.”

I didn’t scream, I didn’t yell. I’ll admit I did raise my voice a little, but I mean, who wouldn’t? This guy took an oath – hey, this guy works for me!

Well, apparently my raising my voice was too much for him, he called out into the hall for some burly hospital workers – you know the ones, those big orderlies in purples shirts – to stand by and be ready to knock me out with a single punch and tie me to a gurney if I brought up any more objections. With their arrival he declared that he didn’t want me to “do much talkin'” since I’m the one who “caused the problem in the first place” by catching cold.

With me quieted for the moment the doctor began to speak. Not to me. Apparently he’d gotten a phone call about something much, much more important than me. I think it was the odds on “Rickety Split” in the seventh.

When what should have been a ten or fifteen minute examination turned to first a half-hour then an hour, my friend, who had driven me to the doctor in case I needed a prescription that would make operating heavy machinery unwise, politely knocked on the door and poked his head in to ask if the exam would be much longer as he had to get back to work. The doctor shrieked, “A mob!!!” and slammed the door on his foot breaking his toe.

My friend was rushed to the O.R. and is expected to make a complete recovery from the full appendectomy and quadruple bi-pass surgery my doctor performed to fix it. The bad news? I’m now on the AMA’s Enemies List for all my fishy questions.