When she told me the news, I realized that she is one of the people who have known me the longest. Family doesn’t count, since they only know an obsolete version of you. But Doctors keep up with your life’s never ending transformations and transitions. She is the keeper of my body’s entire biography and now, decades later, it amounts to a bulging dossier, full of juicy details. If I was famous, she could sell my body’s dirty secrets for a ton of money to a tabloid magazine.
So here I am, without a doctor, without a gatekeeper. My body’s history floating out there, in limbo. I am supposed to transfer my records to a new doctor, a complete stranger! How do I know I can trust this person with my colonoscopies, my appendectomy, arthroscopic surgeries, MRI’s and cardiac stress tests?
I wonder if my Doctor feels guilty about dropping me like a sack of potatoes, discarded and forgotten. Did she feel bad when I sat on her varnished, faux leather chair and complained about my occipital neuralgia? She didn’t lean over and hold my hand with a pained look in her eyes. Thank God, I hear you say. Doctors are pragmatists. They are fixers, like a car mechanic. I wouldn’t expect Joe down the street to burst out in tears at the sight of my Honda’s broken timing belt. So, why am I so disturbed by the fact that my Doctor is retiring? Finding another fixer should not be such a problem.
I grew up in the Netherlands, you see, where our family doctor was also our friend. He based his diagnosis on more than what the symptoms provided. We knew almost as much about him as he did about us. Even as recently as 2017, when I visited my mother who lived in Holland before she died at the ripe old age of 104, her primary care physician came to see her weekly to have a chat, talk about photography and discuss non-medical matters. They had a bond that went beyond the doctor-patient relationship.
But acting the victim is a tactic I am familiar with. During my teaching career, while I was trying to teach ballet positions to children who barely knew how to walk, their parents expected me to be their friend as well. I usually managed to dodge their advances, but once in a while, a parent would become nasty, criticize my lack of communication. After all, mothers of 3 year olds are protective of their brood, with an understandable but excessive desire for control.
So I understand a doctor’s need for boundaries. Without it, their job becomes very difficult. Still, you don’t entrust just any old stranger with the most intimate details of your body’s private life and a patient needs the illusion of being more to their doctors than a collection of body parts. So here I am, pining for something that is probably just in my head, a menage a trois between my body, my doctor and I.
It could be worse, I suppose. In these new ‘Urgent Care’ facilities that are sprouting up like mushrooms, you go in with a shopping bag containing your flue symptoms, plop it down on the counter and ask the doctor on call to take care of it while you sit in the waiting room. The doctor/patient relationship is as alive as a zombie on the Walking Dead.
I was about to start on my autobiography, as is proper for someone my age, but why spend months if not years on a grueling task when I can just sit back with an imaginary cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other and refer to my medical records? If you want to know the real person, don’t rely on biographies that you buy at Amazon. Those are mere distortions of events caused by faulty memories, or other people’s idea of who you ought to be. Especially once you are dead. It’s amazing how much hot air is blown into a dead person’s life.
Medical records, on the other hand, are as clear and unadorned as a newborn baby. You cannot embellish or distort high cholesterol or a ruptured disk. Besides, it makes for exciting reading, like a reality show. Paragraphs full of gory details about premature deliveries, kidney failures and cardiac arrests.
You read stories about famous people doing wonderful things to advance humankind, like Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, but do we ever give credit where credit is due? Isaac Newton’s body struggled with manic depression and Theodore Roosevelt’s body was so weakened by Polio that he couldn’t even stand up. Darwin’s body suffered from panic disorder and agoraphobia, but these famous people’s medical lives were shoved under the rug, hidden from view, unexamined, because having medical issues goes against our ingrained belief that our bodies, like children of yore, should be seen and not heard. They are there at our beck and call and should not complain or give us trouble.
But what if we paid doctors to keep us healthy instead of fixing us when we are sick? In ancient China doctors only got paid while their patients stayed away. You got sick, you stopped paying your doctor. What did patients talk about during their annual checkup, I wonder. The weather?
Many years ago I managed to fall off my bike and landed in a specialist’s waiting room with a partially fractured hip. I watched the battalion of administrative assistants feverishly trying to match the waiting patients with their charts. Packed tightly on the shelves behind them, it seemed impossible to fit one more fracture on that shelf without the whole structure crashing to the floor. If that practice only got paid during a patient’s absence, those charts would lose weight fast and the army of secretaries would be out of a job.
Today, I finally let go of my security blanket and went to see my new doctor. He is almost as nice as my old doctor. I forgive him for not having long black hair, for not speaking with an Armenian accent and for not being called Magda. I am trying to find a reason to prefer my old doctor, but I cannot really find any. My medical records made it to his office in one piece and after a pleasant hour-long intake visit, he asked me if I had any questions. I asked him if he had any plans for retirement in the near future. He looked a bit puzzled seeing that he was probably in his early 40’s, but he was polite and said ‘no’. I knew I was in good hands. By the time my new doctor retires I will no longer need his services. I will be long dead and buried. leave comment here
