nothing like a good medical doctor

For some reason, I generally enter doctor’s offices with a stoical sense of futility, as though they’re not going to be able to solve anything. I’m not sure why, because there are plenty of good doctors around, and because I’m not generally pessimistic about most things. But for some reason I never expect much from doctors.

But of course there are good cases no less than the bad cases. I’ll share two that aren’t especially personal, in case they’re of help to one of my readers.

A bad case: terrible stomach problems in my mid-twenties, running for a couple of years. On bad nights it was so extreme I could barely sleep. I went for high-tech tests that would probably have cost around $10,000 if I hadn’t been insured. I was put through every piece of high-tech equipment known to humankind, and still they couldn’t decide a thing. I gave up and decided to tough it out and just live as best I could with bad stomach problems.

There was an unexpected happy ending, though. While teaching at DePaul I discovered that our insurance covered 90% of acupuncture. I thought “what the heck?”, since I had sat in my brother’s appointment once in Santa Fe and was impressed by the acupuncturist. And at just $6/session after insurance, it was more or less a free experiment. The results in my case were miraculous. After just 4 or 5 acupuncture sessions, the stomach problems were gone forever. I wished I had tried it several years earlier. And if you’re the type of person who fears needles, you really needn’t worry. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say you can’t feel the needles at all. (You can feel maybe one in ten of them, but it’s a pinched sort of tingling rather than a pain).

A good case: tonight’s experience. My back was hurting for about a year. It started right around the time of my rabies incident, so I was worried that it was the result of a bad vaccine. (It turns out the connection between those two facts is so implausible that no one I asked took it seriously for even a second. That was reassuring.)

After a quick battery of questions and a look at the x-rays, he said that my only disease is “tall person spending too much time on a laptop.” If you’re fairly tall and use a laptop on a low desk, as I do at both home and office, you’re asking for trouble. He said that he sees this all the time.

The screen should be at eye level, so prop your screen up high. I need a higher desk at both home and office. Also, he told me to buy an external keyboard so as to be able to keep it much lower than the screen. If I do all that, the back pain will eventually go away.

Apparently he’s a “celebrity” orthopdedist often seen on Egyptian talk shows. And he did have that air about him, but more the “lovable eccentric genius” air than the glamor boy kind. He inspired a lot of confidence. At times it’s hard to specify why, but some people simply inspire confidence while others don’t.

Here’s another funny doctor story… Summer 2003, in Chicago on a research grant. I woke up in the middle of the night with terrible ear pain, and it turned out to be an infection. I was in Cairo by then, and no longer had a doctor in Chicago. So I took the closest office I could find to where I was staying, in the Ravenswood neighborhood.

The doctor obviously knew his stuff, but there was another side to him that was unnerving in a half-amusing sense. He told me he was going to give me a narcotic for the pain, and while writing the prescription he put on the sneakiest evil grin and half-chuckled the words: “It’s a good idea always to have some of these around.”

It turned out to be hydrocodone, which I had never heard of at the time. The pharmacist gave me a weird look when I handed her the prescription, which I didn’t understand until later. And I’d have to say, it’s an extremely good painkiller that also feels like a real narcotic– which it is. You do get a high along with killing the pain. Unfortunately (and you all know Rush Limbaugh was addicted to it, right?) after about 4 days of hydrocodone, I started acting like Rush Limbaugh. That is to say, I was becoming mean and impatient, felt like shoving people who were ahead of me in line, mouthed curses at drivers who turned in front me while crossing the street, etc. So I had to stop taking it, and downgraded to aspirin until the infection was gone. It’s pretty easy to see how people can become addicted to painkillers, but the personality damage would be extreme, at least with that one.