Monday, April 30, 2012

My Doctor Wears Gold Jewelry

He has slicked, jet black hair that he coifs into an Elvis twirl at the front. He's also Asian. There are two gold chains around his neck and a thick, linked, gold bracelet on his right wrist. The minute he walked into my room, I could tell he found himself to be very handsome. Don't believe me? Think I'm making this up to be "funny?" Ask for an appointment with Dr. Tay at the USC Medical Center. THEN we'll see who's laughing. (It will probably be both of us). I've been sick for about three months. The first time I went to Dr. Tay was about a month ago, when I was just a child. Unused to the ways of the sick, the downtrodden, and the "left-behinds" (as I like to call my new invalid-ed self). Doctor: It looks like strep throat, but I won't be able to tell because we ran out of strep tests. Okay. He gave me some penicillin. I go back a month later with inflammation everywhere, nowhere near cured. Doctor: I see. It looks like the penicillin gave you a bladder and/or kidney infection. SEE. He strolls over and sits next to me, legs spread and slouched down in his seat, like how a sophomore in high school would sit next to his lady right before laying on her that he just got drafted into JV. Doctor: See this strip of paper? Now, there are chemicals on it. See the colors? That means there is lots of blood in your system where it shouldn't be. What? His pager goes off for the 5th time. It's as loud as a car alarm. Like, it literally STARTLES him each time it goes off. (then turn down your fucking pager!?) He relaxes next to me again, his gold chains clinking softly as he scoots down further in the chair. Doctor: Uh, my pager. It's so crazy. The number one reason I wanted to become a doctor... was because I wanted to have a pager. Now I'm the only guy in the world with one! hahaha! I give him a mean look that doesn't effect him in the least bit. I'm sure the next bit I will get wrong, so I will not quote the man so pointedly. Basically, he was filling out the form so I could go get my blood drawn, and all he has to do is check off boxes for things so I was like "what do you say about checking off that AIDS box?" And he's like, "You think you have AIDS? Naaaaaaah." This made me FURIOUS! You don't know anything about me! I came VERY close to making up a lot of shit right after that. Every bone in my body wanted to be like, "No, I don't think I have AIDS, but I have been having a lot of unprotected sex with different men, so yeah, you shouldn't just assume because I'm a young, relatively clean white girl that I'm having safe sex." I didn't say that. All I said was "No, I don't think so." And he LAUGHED and said, "Oooh, you put sore throat in a search engine and AIDS popped up on some silly website written by random people, didn't you?" I just nodded, not giving him the benefit of knowing the things I was thinking in my head that would later be written on a blog. "That's so silly. You can't trust those things. You DON'T have AIDS because you have a sore throat!" (Once again, I never said any of those things). My anger was re-routed by the blast of STARTLING RINGING coming from his pocket. He pulled, now, a phone out of his pocket that had also been ringing and beeping the entire time. A constant flow of friendly messenger noises began, and he had to acknowledge it (Or face looking uncool, apparently, a doctor's worst fear). He takes out his phone, starts checking his messages, and goes Doctor: Ha, my old buddy. Look at this. He keeps sending me pictures of horses! And he showed me some pictures of horses. Needless to say, it's been hard to track down this illusive Dr. Tay to get my test results back.

No comments:

Post a Comment