I do not like going to the doctor. Obviously, nobody likes going to the doctor, except little kids, because the waiting room of any upstanding pediatrician has cool stuff like unfamiliar chewed-on toys and other kids to stare at and kooky posters explaining the human skeletal system, as well as dog-eared copies of Highlights Magazine For Children, just in case the grammar-schoolers in the crowd missed the latest installment of “Goofus & Gallant,” the hapless morality comic strip that encouraged kids to follow Gallant’s mannerly good example, even though every kid knew instinctively that imitating Gallant would inevitably lead to a severe beating by the class bully and thus another trip to the pediatrician, so we always rooted for Goofus when he let the cafeteria door slam in his friend’s face instead of holding it open like a patsy the way Gallant always did. I have often wondered in the intervening years what happened to Goofus and Gallant, and whether my predictions for the pair came true, namely that Gallant wound up a Trekkie who has never kissed a girl with tongue and Goofus found fame and fortune as a rock star. I have often wondered, too, why general practitioners don’t put toys in the waiting room anymore – I mean, patients would spend a lot less time checking their watches and huffing about the wait if they had a Nintendo console to distract them, right? “Yeah, the co-pay is sort of high, but I get to play Tekken.”

I also don’t like going to the doctor because, in middle school, I spent oodles of time in various waiting rooms of various doctors, hoping one of them could diagnose the mysterious case of vertigo that kept me out of school for four weeks. I had gotten “the dizzies” every spring for several years, and at the age of twelve, having never gone near a medical dictionary, I could have told the assembled experts that I probably had an allergy of some sort, but the doctors in their infinite wisdom decided to run every test known to the health-care establishment and rule out all the ailments I didn’t have. So I underwent a battery of annoying, uncomfortable, and pointless tests, all pretty much designed to prevent my parents from retaining legal counsel in case a brain tumor had sneaked into my cranium without anyone noticing – taps, cultures, scans, swabs, and one really harrowing and primitive inner-ear test during which I lay on my side and technicians poured freezing cold water into my ear, made notes, flipped me over to my other side and poured freezing cold water into my other ear, made notes, and repeated the process for close to two hours. Finally, we found a doctor who prescribed an antihistamine just for the hell of it, and two days later I could go back to school, finally, after nearly a month of so-called trained professionals shrugging and saying things like “well, we’ve ruled out diabetes” and “aside from the complete absence of any symptoms, it looks a lot like MeniÈre’s disease.”

Anyway, despite my aversion to (and general distrust of the alleged expertise of) doctors and doctors’ offices, I find myself in doctors’ offices rather frequently. You see, next to the word “hypochondriac” in the dictionary, you will find a charming little woodcut illustration of me, staring at a bitty little hangnail on my pinky and crying real tears of fear (not shown: my best friend patiently murmuring that no, it DOESN’T look gangrenous to her, and no, they probably WON’T have to amputate it, so no, I probably WON’T have a deformed hand and never get married and die all alone with only my three remaining fingers for company. Also not shown: me, finally calmed down, bursting into fresh sobs when my best friend addresses me as “Three-Finger Sadie”). When food goes down the wrong way, I worry about it getting trapped in my lung and sprouting down there. When my back hurts for no reason, I assume I contracted meningitis. New freckle? Carcinoma. Headache? Encephalitis. Slight cough? Tuberculosis. I take more vitamin supplements than the average pro sports team, but every time a new bruise shows up, I prepare myself for the fight against leukemia.

Usually, though, I content myself with staying home and planning my funeral instead of making a doctor’s appointment, because in the managed-care world, I could die of old age before I got to see an actual licensed physician anyway. The gynecologist I used to go to constitutes the worst example of this I’ve ever encountered; she primarily treated pregnant women, and I would come in for an appointment and read every damn magazine in the waiting room, and women who had just gotten pregnant when I arrived would go through the entire gestation period, deliver, come in for post-natal check-ups, and send their kids to kindergarten before I even got weighed. Add to this the fact that the GYN, a woman, not only bore a startling resemblance to James Earl Jones but had also hired far and away the most clueless and unpleasant staff in the five boroughs. Should I have to assist an alleged registered nurse in the drawing of my blood, or continue to watch her spatter the floor with errant drops of my A-negative? No, I don’t think I should. Does everyone in the waiting room need to know that my blood work came back normal, except for “elevated testosterone levels”? No, I don’t think they do, and by the way, “keeping patient information confidential” and “announcing patient hormone levels in a voice so piercing that only a couple of guys on an oil rig in the middle of the Indian Ocean didn’t hear you” are in fact NOT SYNONYMOUS.

I don’t envy medical receptionists their jobs, but these women need to spend a little less time attending to their Maui-at-sunset manicures, or screeching at each other in Vietnamese, or ordering in lunch, and a little more time attending to the patients, who would like to pay their ten bucks and get back to work or go back to bed, and who have stood in front of the desk, insurance card in hand, for the better part of ten minutes while one girl eats a malodorous macaroni salad and the other girl tries to figure out why Tetris keeps crashing the appointments program. I went to the doctor today because I have a nasty sinus infection, so I sort of needed a Kleenex, but the Kleenex box in the waiting room had no Kleenex in it, and judging from the dust accruing to the box it had not had Kleenex in it since early in George Bush’s presidency. When I asked politely for a fresh box, they gave me this drop-dead stare as though I’d asked to borrow money from them. Here’s a tip – you work IN A DOCTOR’S OFFICE. A person sitting here waiting for the doctor just might possibly HAVE A COLD. Like, SO sorry to BOTHER you, Macaroni Balboa, but either I can drip my funky SNOT all over your DESK, or you can get off your butt and GET ME MORE TISSUES. At the very least, get the guy NEXT TO ME more tissues, because apparently he missed school the day they discussed covering the mouth while sneezing and coughing, and thanks to this educational oversight, a fine mist of bacteria-ridden MUCUS has settled all over the right side of my FACE. Finally, Macaroni came across with a box of institutional Kleenex, guaranteed to take the skin off the toughest schnozz, and everyone in the waiting room pounced on it, and one lady went up to the desk to ask where she could throw her used Kleenices away, and Macaroni said, “Don’t give me those! Gross!” “Gross”? Why do you work here, Macaroni? WHY?

I would love to switch primary-care providers, believe me, but not many doctors take my insurance plan, and the ones that do have a list of patients a mile long already and won’t take any new patients, and if I go off-plan, I have to fill out a reimbursement form that makes a tax return seem like a boat ride down the Seine by comparison, so I have to go to Dr. Klein. Dr. Klein regularly keeps everyone waiting forty-five minutes in the seating area, and another fifteen to twenty in the examining room, so that she can breeze in and out in about five minutes. In addition, the staff plays a greatest-hits-of-classical-music tape on the sound system, so this afternoon all the coughing and hacking and macaroni-eating took place to the incongruous accompaniment of Strauss’s “Thus Sprach Zarathustra,” followed by “Ride of the Valkyries.” Try to imagine seven people with stuffed-up noses humming along to that one. On second thought, no, don’t. Today, I arrived at 3:12 for a 3:15 appointment. At 3:52, Macaroni awakened me from the stupor into which I had fallen after “The Moonlight Sonata,” escorted me into a tiny examining room, turned off the air conditioning in the room, and left me alone in the sweat lodge. At 4:04 she burst in again: “Have you had a fever at all?” “Not until now,” I said, mopping my brow. At 4:17, Dr. Klein – who, by the way, has perfect hair, which I have begun to suspect she touches up at length between patients – swept in, took a strep culture, forgot to look in my ears until I reminded her, and wrote me a scrip for an antibiotic that I have an allergy to. What time did she leave the room? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, 4:20. As I headed to the desk to pay, I heard someone in another examining room singing along to “O Sole Mio,” except he substituted the words “any day now” for the actual lyrics. “Word,” I grumbled.

I understand that the doctors only get ten or twenty dollars off of us each until they bill the insurance carrier, and I understand that they have a lot to do, but that isn’t our fault. Would it kill them to spend a little time with us, or not to book us to an appointment they can’t keep? Between the waiting on hold with the receptionist to make the appointment and the waiting in the waiting room and the waiting in the examining room and the waiting at the pharmacy and the train ride blah blah blah fishcakes, I lost three hours dealing with this today, and I think that stinks, and I think we should all revolt until the system gets reformed, or at least until we all get birth control for free and a Domino’s-style “we see you in twenty minutes or you get your appointment free” guarantee, and I never want to see another goddamn elbow of macaroni again as long as I live.

Share!