My appointment with the Doctor!

Dear Cheeniya sir,
After a long time since I visited this site and checked your forum, I was delighted to find a new post! As usual, you were at your hilarious best! Who else could write about a doctor's visit with so light-heartedly?
My visit to the doctor is rare too, though my family physician stays a stone's throw away from my home. And when I do visit him, and he enquires about my welfare, I respond," How can I be well if I am visiting you! " By God's grace, I do not have to visit my doctor often.
As regards to cockroaches, I could not get rid of my fear of them, so got rid of them instead!
Loved your post and had a hearty laugh while my dh was wondering if I had gone berserk early in the morning!
Love
Malathi

 

My dear Cheeniya sir,

Whatte story! No, I don't mean to imply that you are concocting them, just admiring the rippling cadence of humour through your narration! I never fail to get the impression I am reading a piece by our favourite PGW.

How can I blame your BH for failing to accompany you to the doctor on this occasion? Your encounters with the doc never fail to remind me of my mom who after her cataract surgery used to complain about her watering eyes or itching eyes and I would have to take an appointment with the doc 3 weeks ahead of time, after which it would be a drive across town and a wait of 3 hours at the clinic despite all appointments taken. After all this the doc would walk in and ask "How are you Amma"? A beam would light her face and she would reply "I'm fine". Now could you imagine how frustrated and foolish I would feel at that moment in time? When she was admitted to hospital for her hip surgery, the doc walked in the day before the surgery. This lady with the broken fracture sits there with a smile on her face and replies to the standard question "I'm fine thank you, how are you?" The two months she was in hospital, they would come in every morning and ask the same question and she would always reply the same despite her dementia.

Talk of MRIs, you just gave me my answer to a question I have been asking. Of course I have had the 'tunnel experience' that people with NDEs talk about. I never fail to enter the MRI machine, shut my eyes, chanting "Om Nama Shivaya" and somehow or the other I fall into a trance like state where I am aware of my surroundings but never bothered by them and hate it when they come to drag me back to the 'real' world! I have not told anyone about this exprience, lest I get dragged off to the psychiatrist next. Now who is to convince the psychiatrist that it is the so-called 'real world' that needs to be treated and not the ones in so-called 'la la land'.

You never tire of talking about cockroaches, lizards and the like, do you? At home it was dad who did the needful; he got me married so I should have 'purusha tunai' for the rest of my life to protect me ..... and what happens? He probably did not bargain for the fact that many mothers these days get their sons married for the same reason. So here I find myself chasing cockroaches and lizards out of the house (somehow I have lost my violent streak - I used to kill cockroaches earlier). Now I use a wet cloth to catch hold of them and release them back to Nature to whom they rightfully belong. I can't help remembering my dad everytime I do that.

Really good to read such a delightful piece early in the morning.

 

hey That was an interesting read.On first thoughts I stared listing out ailments : Bp/ heart / etc .only to realize it was more in a lighter vain than of a pathophysiological condition.I know we are so wired the minute the patient says i have such an such feeling .start enlisting conditions.
now regards getting ready way ahead of time my dad was so too.planning days ahead and since early morning on the day of the event.

 

Almost feel like an accomplished detective when I focus on these sub-plots in the storyline, rotate my head and inquire — did anyone notice it? How many of us have visited a doctor's clinic, and walked out to write a humorous and chuckling tale on our medical gest, and published swiftly on blogosphere, leaving out the inescapable & unnatural 3-legged piece of furniture ever designed on which one precariously sits drawing parallels between an elephant in a circus. Yes, that is exactly how I must have felt every time but could not have expressed the discomfort or puzzlement on this armless, headless and spineless fixture as agreeably as you did in that one line. Not to stink filthy but I did wonder on few occasionals, would a metallic rim plump enough to hold the hinds and not create a bas-relief of two chords on fleshy bottom burn the expenses of the medical clinic?

Ask me I'm a woman and a very typical woman who is scared of harmless aphids to obnoxious lizards but did you say cockroach? I was never scared of roaches, hmm, I admire them as tough and grunge creatures labouring in the kitchen digging into middens of domestic waste and if the ant was not slight and the roaches were of paler complexion their illustriousness would have been emblazoned and featured in Aesop's fables as "Tale of Roach and the Grasshopper". I've a distorted notion of several things, so my attestation of roaches as sedulous and respectable blue-thoraxed bugs may be scientifically unfounded. But then Cheeniya, hasn't the chatty and poetic incarnation of pesky cockroach in the form of Archy (fictional character created by Don Marquis for his newspaper column) not redeeming enough to elevate the status of the crummy creatures to sensitive creatures (here case-sensitive typing only in lower case). Will that help you to soften your fear?




I've always had enriching and koan experiences with doctors (read that as visited w.r.t injury, malady afflicted in anatomical regions I had very little knowledge about) listening to their explanations, preventions, cure and prophylactic guidance. One time I had a severe back pain, rushed to the hospital, and was restrained to admit myself in emergency ward by my patient and level-headed friend who accompanied. After waiting for 30 mins and entering into the physician's room, instead of liturgy of ailments I garbled "Doctor, I think my spinal code is broken, fractured, or cracked whatever. Or, may be one of my vertebrae is displaced or disappeared. I'm sure all this will show up on the scan along with my swollen lumbar region". The doctor took a deep breath and asked — "Now that we have sorted out your diagnosis, just for the completion of record could you state the symptoms associated with such heightened mutilation of your spinal cord". The look on his face, women I tell you with bit of biology crammed in school they are ready to teach Galen. I shut my mouth for every other doctor appointment after this. You see, it was not pretentious knowledge, it was just excitement, fear, overwrought brain waking up after sleeping on a cantilevered bed, nothing but only broken spinal cord can explain that , right? Of course a person cannot stand erect dismiss walking but then Cheeniya you tell me how else can you explain all that pain , till date I say it was broken and then mysteriously fixed the next day no matter what the doc says about sprain and just a teensy sprain.


I don't flip papers these days but Hindu and TOI used to publish supplementary editions every Saturday/Sunday for their irregular customers to read weekend special columns. Would you mind scheduling your column weekly instead of monthly (your last snippet was published in April) to engage lazy and derelict souls like me. Not too much to ask as a devoted passive reader of your corner.

 

You are right! Rotate, strobe, infra-red spectroscopy, and blow-up of the image to confirm atrophy of locomotive detachments. Huh, desuetude of natural selection! Behold! But then Cheeniya, would that extra pair of inactive limbs not assist to shoo fleas? We all agree that squinting larval, wriggling baby, worker dada, housebound mama roaches don't work in the most hospitable and green environs and recourse to insurance under such infernal living conditions is exploitive and long-standing legal battle between slogging arthropodic scriveners and 3PM T-break in parlour typists of Chennai High Court Complex. Again don't take this as selling you the idea of handshake with the scavenger species and assessing the GDP index to mankind on their amiss trade union strikes.

No intonation or incantation of pop-mantra rallied by our petite Taylor Swift — "Shake it off" can slough that layer of torpor induced by withering summer in me. So your frequent participation will stimulate me to exert my limbs in the most employable manner by typing away rapturous replies.