It was time for the annual trip to the doctor. Sporadically annual that is. It had been two and a half years since I’d seen her. I figured she would yell at me about my weight. She is our family doctor and she is annoyingly thorough and highly recommended by my wife’s medical contacts. I filled out the questionnaire and sat by while the nurse took all the vitals. My blood pressure was 126/80. My temperature was 98.5. I asked her if it was supposed to be 98.6 and she said, “Yes, which makes you very slightly cool.” I told her it was better to be slightly cool then not to be cool at all.
I put on the six sizes too small gown and placed the sheet strategically on my lap and read the New Yorker cartoons until she walked in the door. She reviewed her chart and reminded me that it had been two and a half years since she had seen me and told me it was supposed to be an ‘annual’ checkup. Since the best defense is a good offense, I told her that I was starting to lose weight again now that I was back taking karate. She huh-hummed while she continued to read through my chart and asked when the last time was that I had seen the neurosurgeon about my neck. I couldn’t remember and she told me to call and make an appointment. She started her exam, thumping and listening and huh-humming away. She looked in my nose and eyes and mouth and ears and then asked me to grip her fingers. She started messing with my left hand and arm and pushed on my left shoulder. I yelped because my shoulder hurts when you push on it and she said she was sorry and then pushed on it again so I was doubting the sincerity of the apology while I yelped again. Like the cop trying to see if I was drunk, she made me walk heel toe across the room. I couldn’t do it for the cop or the doc and she asked why my foot was trembling as I walked and I told her it was because of concentration and she said, “Bullshit, it is because of pain.”
It surprised me that she said bullshit because she doesn’t normally talk that way. It also surprised me that she thought I had pain in my legs and feet and so I told her they didn’t hurt and she told me that it was collateral effects of the pain in my neck. She went back to her chart and asked if I had seen the pain clinic doctor recently. I told her my next appointment was coming up and that the Lyrica and the Cymbalta and the Vicadin seemed to be working to control the pain rather well and that I was pretty functional.
That is when she started yelling at me. She told me to call the surgeon right away and that if he didn’t respond to call some other surgeon whose name she would give me. She told me to get the issue with my neck resolved because the constant pressure on the ulna nerve was not good and eventually it would give up and shut down and it would not ever come back to life. She told me I needed to listen to the doctors and I protested and told her I was doing exactly what the doctor told me to do: take pain medications until I couldn’t stand it any more and then he would consider surgery. She snorted and told me I have too high a pain threshold to follow that advice and that she would never tell someone like me to just grin and bear it. She asked me why in the world I was taking karate and I told her it was to get in shape and she yelled at me about taking blows to the head and reminded me that a hard blow to the head could leave me paralyzed for life. I told her that nobody was allowed to hit me in the head or neck and that I was very careful about what I could and couldn’t do and that the sensei was really good about finding ‘work arounds’ that allowed me to do techniques without using my left arm or shoulder. I told her I was so out of shape I had fainted and that is when she blew a gasket and told me, if I had hit my head when I fainted, I could be paralyzed.
I tried yelling back about how I could trip walking down the sidewalk and take a blow to the head and be paralyzed, but that I couldn’t just stop living and stop doing stuff just because something might happen. She huh-hummed, but I don’t think she was buying it. She told her nurse to bring in the ekg machine and left while the nurse ran the test. Later she popped her head in and said, “You have an abnormal ekg and I’m sending you to a heart doctor. Since we have no baseline so it could be normal for you, but I don’t like it especially since you fainted in karate so you need a checkout by a cardiologist. Meanwhile, no karate, no strenuous exercise, nothing. Call the neurologist and the pain doctor and the heart doctor today. Be back here in a month and you better have seen all the doctors.”
She told me to complain about my pain. She told me to talk about it a lot. I told her I did that and she said the ‘b’ word again and told me to nag doctors about it and tell everybody how much it hurts. She told me not to just grin and bear it and try to adapt to it. I told her that I had complained to the doctors about it and they had sent me to the pain management clinic and that I assumed, from that encounter, that I needed to learn to just manage it. She told me to stop managing it and to start complaining about it.
So here goes. My shoulder hurts like hell and my neck is always sore. I am so tired of the constant neck and shoulder pain and my left arm tingling like it is asleep that I could scream. I hate that I can’t lift things and hold things and throw things and be the man I used to be. I hate the stupid drug haze because it muddles my brain and makes me feel even more useless than I already feel. I admit I’d rather feel the icy edge of pain then the mind mushing, tongue thickening, body dragging effects of pain medication. I’m tired of carrying around all these extra pounds and am mad at myself for lacking the discipline to just make them go away. I hate that I can’t swing a golf club or shoot a basketball or even do a left arm parry in karate. I’m tired of drug induced sleep that really isn’t sleep at all but just a poor substitute for real rest. I confess that I hate the age of decay and long for the glories of the great Next. End rant.
That said, I still choose to live. Here. Now. When I shared about my doctor visit with Eric and Julie and James at church yesterday, they told me that this will be the year of Rod taking care of himself. They have all been praying about that. I listened to Eric’s talk from the Drumming Circle online. He said I laid down my health for the Village. I wish that were true. Mostly I am a sinner who tries to convince others to make healthy choices while making unhealthy ones for himself. So, I have an an appointment with the heart doctor on this coming Monday. On April 10 I will see the neurosurgeon again. I am going to learn the fine art of taking care of myself. Something I find easier to teach than to do. Please pray for me and encourage me from time to time. Thanks.
Rod |