He is Not Dead Until the Doctor Gets There

By TRB

Don't you just hate those fights with your doctor? I had a real screamer with mine on the phone yesterday.

I had called earlier telling his nurse to refill a prescription, which for reasons unforeseen, had become inadequate. She said the doctor was out and she could not get him. I said get another doctor to look at my chart and write the prescription. Hours later she called saying that no doctor would write it and I would have to wait until Monday.

That's when the Bad Michael came out. I told her to forget about the prescription. Instead just give me your name. And, while you are at it leave a note for the doctor telling him I will not be at my next appointment, but I will instead be shopping for a new doctor. She said, but he can't do it, he's off Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. I said that's okay. I knew he was semi-retired. Then I waited.

Maybe an hour passed before my doctor called from his home in China Town. He has been my doctor for more than 20 years and I know him and he knows me better than either of us know his nurse. As it turned out the nurse had text messaged him in a panic at his house. He had driven to the hospital and my prescription would be ready when I got there.

But of course we had a phone fight. If you were running out, why didn't you call earlier in the week? I was busy. You were busy? You were busy? What do you think I was doing, writing a novel? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My father would have recognized me immediately.

My father hated doctors and doctors hated him. "Practicing physician," he would say with derision. "This man is my doctor and he is still practicing? Well, when will he stop practicing and learn?" He thought the whole idea of calling a practice a practice was as accurate as any doctor could get. And he always insisted, even back in the 1950s, when doctors were still highly paid Gods that the doctor tell him everything. If the doctor was writing something down while treating my father, my father would not leave until he could read it.

I had only one doctor through most of my young life. This was Doctor Jacobs who "practiced" out of an office downtown. He was the only doctor who could scare my father, Threatening to punch him out was often an effective way of dealing with my father. But you had better be on awfully high moral ground if you wanted to do that.

One day I had a fever that was up around 103. My father, who was also unfortunately a hypochondriac, snatched the thermometer out of my mouth and read the results like a death sentence. He wrapped me in blankets until I looked like a load of laundry with a head sticking out of it and he marched down the staircase depositing me on a sofa in our hall. I can still remember looking around at the inside of that house trying to take it all it, so convinced was I that I might never see it again.

This was not to be the case however. It was raining like hell by the time we'd gotten to Jacob's office and I was ready to be transferred to a hospital. First the doctor had to run some simple tests. He eyed my father the whole time and not in a good way. Suddenly convinced of his diagnosis he turned to my father and said. "Get this child home, and to bed. He has the flu, and shouldn't be out of the house in weather like this." My father was appropriately upset backing out the door, when the doctor said a very stupid thing. I don't know what it is about little men; they simply can't win an argument and let it go at that. Instead, he called my father a fool.

I can remember falling to the floor wrapped in all that laundry as my father grabbed this doctor by the neck and prepared to punch him in the face. He didn't punch the doctor though, just gave him a small taste of what it might be like. My father would avoid physical confrontation but then there was this line that had been crossed, calling him a fool "In front of my own boy." That doctor was always very polite to my father following that incident.

Still, why is it that many doctors find it so difficult to adopt the manners of a human being?

Like my father, I also hated doctors and they usually hated me. Then Web MD (imagine if Web MD had been around during my father's days) came along I was more than happy to use my computer as my doctor. Hell I figured it could probably "practice" some medicine on it own.The problem with Web MD and other medical computer sites is that they can't see you, perform tests on you, etc. They can only speculate. If you've got this, which is a possibility according to your symptoms, drink more lemonade. It could also mean that you've got this which usually will kill you if it goes untreated. Web MD is good, you should just never use it for your doctor.

As an adult the first time I really saw a doctor his hands were in my chest cavity. I only remember a moment of it. When I awakened maybe two days later, the same doctor was in my room. It was a U.S. Army hospital so all the doctors wore rank. My doctor was a colonel. I studied him for a moment. He was nicely tanned, had a one or two hundred dollar haircut, handmade Italian shoes, tall, good-looking and he was wearing a white robe covered in blood.

Our eyes met. One of the first things I noticed was that he was smoking. "Took the top lobe of you left lung, Sarge," he told me as he took a drag of his cigarette. "But it went off very well, got rid of the damage, you should have no problems at all." I was 20 years old when I met this charming, but probably no longer practicing doctor.

Two years later I was covering an Army field exercise for a newspaper. The exercise was important because it would be one of the first times the news media got a look at two new pieces of military equipment One was the A10 tank killer, an armored jet, believe it or not, that flew at low altitude and at low speed with the main goal of killing tanks. They also introduced a new version of a current tank. The new version was equipped with more target acquisition electronics, and that had to be a good thing, right? Maybe not.

There had been some glitches. For example, just a regular U.S. Army-issued radio screwed to the back seat of a Jeep could cause the electronics in these new tanks to do some funny things - on their own. So, for example, if you keyed your radio in the near vicinity of one of these tanks it just might cause the tank's main gun to move a few inches. Strange.

It got very strange when someone was talking on a jeep radio near a parked tank whose commander I had known for two years. He must have felt his main gun move a little so he got up to see if everything was all right, The main gun was in the up position, meaning that the other half of it (the gun part of the gun) was in a low position inside the main turret,

Suddenly main gun of the tank just lowered on its own. The barrel just dropped. All of us saw it happen. All of us knew that the other end of the main gun where they put in the ammunition must have risen quite significantly inside the main cupola. It is like a see-saw, one side is all the way down while the other is all the way up and visa versa. It had - and in the process it had crushed my friend's head against the inside of the tank. He was very dead.

I called it in saying the tank commander was dead. I explained the circumstances that he was killed instantly. The radio squeaked and burped a few times then this horrible major whose voice I recognized said, "He is not dead until the doctor gets there,"

Great, I thought, maybe we'll still have an hour or so to talk about the good times before he is pronounced,