Bad Medicine

I was feeling some pain in my knee the past few days (as people observed, “Mitchell, you’re walking even weirder than usual”), so I decided to see the doctor regarding my sore knee. I was pretty sure that my knee would get better on its own anyway, but I figured it would do me good to visit the doctor to get a general check-up since the last time I had been in a doctor’s office was four years ago. I now remember why I haven’t gone to the doctor in four years.

First you have to make an appointment time to see the physician. Of course, when they tell you that your appointment is at 3:45, what they mean is that the doctor is waking up at 3:45 that day. To bide your time, the hospital begins to start throwing random paperwork at you to fill out in the waiting room. At one point I was pretty sure I was filling out a magazine subscription order for the National Geographics they keep in the room.

Once you’re done with the paperwork (allow three to four days) a nurse comes to check you in. Now, I’m not going to argue with nurses and doctors since they all learned stuff at school while I’m trying to figure out how to order pizza. But I never got the reasoning that the best way to determine my health is to stick random things in my ear. Ears don’t serve any purpose. God gave men ears so that women would think we were actually listening (he didn’t want us to actually listen though, or he would have also given us brains). And yet here are these nurses spending all their time on my ear even though I had specified earlier that my problem was in my knee (which when I last looked, is about as far away from my ear as you can get).

Finally, the nurse is done checking you in and you get to see the doctor. Or, at least you get to see the doctor’s office. The nurse then tells you to sit on this stupid little table covered in giant toilet paper (of course, with my knee, I struggled to even get onto the table). The nurse just leaves you in there, telling you that the doctor will be with you in a short while. In reality you will sit in that room so long you forget why you came there in the first place (I think the hospital is secretly hoping you will die in the room so they don’t have to treat you). During my time there, I read the college degrees on the wall (all in Latin), a poster on how to stay healthy in foreign countries (avoid Mexico) and the instructions on a blood pressure monitor (made in China). At one point, the doctor poked her head in to inform me she would be with me shortly, but told me in a cheerful voice that she had to stop some bleeding. Then she smiled and left. At that point I considered running, since this woman was clearly crazy (but then I remembered I can’t run, which is why I was there in the first place).

Let me digress for a second. The last time I had been to the doctor was in my junior year to get my physical so I could swim for the high school. Now, every year I got my physical from one of two doctors. One of them was an older doctor who clearly did not give a flying fig about my health. He was my favorite. He would just look at me to make sure I wasn’t dead, ask me a few questions (“You dead?”) and then sign my physical. But Dr. Fong was a different story. He went through all of the questions on my physical, including the dreaded cough test (for women who may not know what this is, the doctor takes his cold, gloved hands, and then does something that you normally have to pay women to do).

Anyway, my doctor finally came in, and the conversation went like this:

Me: My knee hurts, especially when I bend it.

Doctor: (Bends knee) Like this?

Me: OWWWWW YES YES YES STOP!

Doctor: Hmm, pain when knee is bent.

She then asked me if I had done anything to make my knee worse since it started to hurt. I said no of course, even though since my knee started hurting I had played basketball, frisbee, bowling, and fallen down the stairs. I’m pretty sure she knew I was lying, cause she then sent me down to radiology to get my knee x-rayed. If you have never gotten an x-ray, it is not as cool as it sounds. For one, thing, there is no way the whole process is safe for humans. First, the radiologist (in my case, a woman with a thick Russian accent, probably named Helga) aims this huge contraption hanging from the ceiling at you. Then she puts a metal jacket on you that soldiers in Iraq would love to have. Then the radiologist runs behind what appears to be a bomb shelter to press a button that sends radioactive waves to liquidize your kidney. My doctor then showed me my x-rays five minutes later, which is pretty useless considering even though she apparently could distinguish many things from it, she could have showed me the blueprints to the building and I wouldn’t have noticed a difference.

So finally, she told me she wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Doctors never do. The only doctor that will ever know what is wrong with you is the coroner. The doctor guessed that I probably just had a knee sprain or strain with some fluid buildup and told me to ice my knee, take some pills, and don’t run around. Which is what I figured before I went to the doctor (even though I have done none of the things she had recommended). So I learned absolutely nothing from my three hour visit. Except that when I get sick, I’m skipping the doctor and driving straight to the mortuary.