My left knee hurts really, really bad. Actually, it’s the back of my knee and it’s been hurting for months. So naturally, as a card-carrying member of the Homostubbornous species (primary characteristics: chest hair, refusal to stop for directions, pee standing up), I’ve chosen to ignore the pain — much to the chagrin of my wife Julie.
JULIE: Will you just see a doctor already?
ME: No, don’t be silly. I’m fine.
JULIE: You’re limping.
ME: Just a little.
JULIE: You’re in constant pain!
ME: Only when I move.
For the last six months, I’ve ignored the pain, believing it would eventually stop and I’d be able to once again partake in quintessential male activities, like sports and body scratching. And while I had thought this approach would somehow evoke a magical recovery, I started to lose hope recently, namely when my knee turned purple. Macho schmacho, enough was enough.
So last week, I finally buckled under the pressure of my wife’s requests, not to mention my body weight, and decided it was time to see a doctor. There was just one small matter to attend to: I didn’t have a doctor.
Now everybody knows that choosing a doctor is a very serious matter. After all, your entire well-being depends solely on your decision. With this in mind, I used a highly calculated and well thought-out method to select a physician: I opened the insurance book to a random page and called the first number I saw. Unfortunately that turned out to be Dr. Judith Rose, OB-GYN — a minor detail I realized when the nurse asked about my cycle.
I flipped a few pages in the insurance book to the Primary Care section where I, once again based my selection on the most important of medical criteria: I called the doctor whose office was closest to my apartment.
The nurse who answered my call sounded very busy, but clearly not as busy as the doctor, whom she said would see me “sometime between December and the next Olympic games.” I tried to hide my frustration, but the nurse must’ve heard the phone banging against my skull because she offered to call me should the doctor’s schedule change.
Amazingly at 8:30 the next morning, the nurse called. Another patient had cancelled and the doctor had an opening at 9. She asked if I could make it. I said I could. She told me to come a few minutes early to fill out some papers. I said I would. She told me the doctor was very busy and stressed the importance of my being on time.
Ten minutes later, I was in the waiting room. Ninety minutes later, I was still in the waiting room. When my wait time reached the two hour mark, a nurse came and escorted me to a tiny exam room.
“The doctor is very busy, but he’ll be with you as soon as he can,” the nurse said.
I looked around the room, which was wallpapered with posters of various medical anomalies. One of these posters featured a full-color photo of a scaly, pink object, enlarged to monstrous proportions. Above the gruesome image, in block letters, was a simple question: ARE YOU TAKING CARE OF YOUR UVULA?
After 45 minutes of pondering the state of my uvula, the doctor arrived, his face buried in a file. “So they tell me something’s wrong with the back of your knee,” he said without looking up from his papers. “Let’s take a little looksee.”
This so-called “looksee” turned out to be the doctor’s cold hands squeezing various parts of my leg. I didn’t know whether to be happy that I was getting such a thorough exam, or ticked that he didn’t buy me dinner first. Nevertheless, after several minutes of the doctor applying pressure to my knee and asking “does this hurt?” and “how about here?,” he gave me the cold, hard truth.
“There’s something wrong with the back of your knee.”
He scribbled down a prescription for me to see a specialist and have an MRI scan. Moments later, he was gone, leaving me with a purple knee and newfound anxiety about my uvula.
That was last week. I’ve since had my MRI and am now waiting for my follow-up appointment with the doctor. I’m hoping he can make some sense out of the 256 image scans of my knee. Maybe he’ll say that I’ve injured my hamstring. Or maybe it’ll be a sprain, or a tear. Or maybe he’ll make a more generalized observation like, “I don’t understand why the purple isn’t showing up in the X-rays.”
Whatever the case, I won’t find out until the day of my appointment. Or the next Olympics games. Whichever comes first.
© 2005 robbloom.com.
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