A Supposedly Healthy Thing That I’ll Never, I Mean Frequently, Do Again
A stuffy old man who was supposed to help me was offended and distracted by my apparent lack of manners.
A few years ago, I went to a doctor’s appointment. Actually, I went to many appointments that year. And at the end of this roughly hour-long appointment, my doctor asked me why I was yawning.
The doctor had the sort of cold, gruff bedside manner you hope means he’s actually brilliant and will solve all your problems and ailments and find the missing diagnosis or lab test that will pull all these winding threads together. Sadly my life isn’t some formulaic medical tv show, and his brusque treatment of me didn’t mean he was an arrogant genius; he was just arrogant.
I got the appointment after hearing he was highly recommended by a friend of a family member. Apparently he had been excellent in handling this guy’s endocrine operation — was it a tumor maybe? It’s been years — which was the sort of serious, acute, clearly identifiable incident that our medical system generally handles rather well. I, of course, came to him with the opposite situation: years, at that point, of chronic, unexplained symptoms, exacerbated by a recent ill-advised stint interning in New York. He was an endocrinologist, and I was…
