How Well Will You Recover? The Secret Psychology of the Perfect Physician
On finding that perfect fit for your particular lifestyle. These worked for me, and why I fought to keep them
No matter how old you are, you need a doctor who is in your corner. Not all of them are. As you age, you will find this harder, as ageism is rife in the medical community. This article addresses two primary kinds of docs that I’ve encountered (there are plenty of other kinds, but for the sake of simplicity, just two).
Let’s set the stage:
I was nineteen. It was 1972, Central Florida. Not a particularly enlightened time, nor an enlightened place to be a girl. I had returned from Denver with a severed Achilles tendon with a horrible repair job, still in a cast, and a compulsive smoking habit. Five packs a day.
That kind of compulsive.
The day the cast came off, Dr. Willy Steele, my mother’s physician and a chain-smoker himself, told me in no uncertain terms two things that he absolutely believed: “You will always walk with a limp. And you will always smoke.”
The next day, I threw out all my cigarettes. I hobbled to the starting line of the 600-yard track at my old junior high school. My leg and lungs were both…
