New Doctor in Town

I met my new doctor yesterday. She looks like she just got out of high school. She made a point of telling me that some of my favorite medications are "old school" and I shouldn't use them any more. I liked her, anyway.

She poked and prodded, had me take deep breaths, and murmured "good, good," over and over again. Do doctors ever get wide-eyed and say, "Oh, no!" while checking you? (I didn't think so.)

Then she asked me a question I could've answered easily 30 years ago. Not so much today: "Do you have pain?" ["Well, yeah," I wanted to say, "I'm old!] I hesitated a little too long, making her think I didn't understand the question. How do you tell a lively young thing that pain is ever-present when you are older? That it creeps on you, one little twinge at a time, so that you don't think of it as pain per se; it's just the way your body feels. Every day. You forget it's there until something happens to make it go away for a few glorious moments. I'm not alone in this: I just found out one of my friends looks forward to her colonoscopies because she has no pain for 20 minutes while she's under the sedative. (Yes, I know. We're pathetic.)

Young Doctor asked again. I told her about the new pain, the one that made me decide to come in today. I avoided this visit because I knew it would spawn a mulitude of visits to other, more invasive specialists. I was right. I'm now scheduled for the Grand Tour; three in all.

I'm trying to learn to think positively, so I'll just think about those 20 pain-free moments. (C'mon, admit it--you started thinking about it the minute I said "pain-free", didn't you?) If the NIH heard about this, do you think they would start using it in their ads to inspire us to go get checked? Maybe I should let them know. (Hey, it was just a thought!)