Because You Never Asked

DOCTORS, II

(6/07, Spain)

     Without fatiguing the reader with detail, it could be said I do not abuse myself physically and have maintained a good level of health for the almost 62 years I’ve been sustained by Mother Earth. I’ve had little opportunity to use the medical arts of my culture, but the few times I’ve truly needed such services have not produced the healing precision our television medicine always portrays. The true story I’m about to tell is really 3 true stories, all tales of professional medical failure of the highest degree. Without this repetitive quality, these 2 essays would not have been born.

     This series, as will be shown a bit later on, was inspired just a week ago while immersed in my annual 2 month stay by the Roman Sea. When it began to percolate in my mind, I looked back on my medical history in search of some successful gestation performed upon me by a doctor. I’ve had a few wounds closed with stitches ---

     Precious little else has gone right in the minimal drama of my medical life. The first story I’m about to tell was not pertinent to my own health, but to the woman I was then married to (close enough). It happened about 19 years ago.

     Somewhere along the line, my wife began to experience a burning sensation in her vaginal region, a symptom perhaps more prevalent in the moist tropical environment where I live. Within a few days this began escalating into a state of complete corporal disintegration. Sixteen years after whatever love we may have felt for each other had dissipated, I can still conjure up a quota of romantic affection for the suffering she had to endure during this episode. By the time we called a cab at 3AM to go to the emergency room, she was sweating profusely, could hardly walk, was aching all over, and not only could not keep down food, but could not even ingest water! In short, the loss of her life was not out of the question.

     The emergency room people put her on some intravenous regimen and, without being willing or able to venture a guess as to what could possibly result in a heretofore healthy young woman being reduced to such a moribund state, returned her as a barely functioning organism, which was a big improvement over how I’d delivered her to them. They gave her some pills to help her sleep, and suggested we see a gynecologist.

     The gynecologist performed whatever hocus-pocus his specialty consists of and decided to treat it as an infection of some kind, calling for the usual rounds of pills and medications. When this failed, we were passed on to a “urologist” in the hope that his bag of tricks might be the ones necessary to resolve the riddle. My most cogent memory of his intervention was an office filled with religious reliquary and festooned with quotes from the Bible. This combination of God and science inspired little confidence in us, who looked for cures not miracles from our medical professionals. He eventually passed the buck (which does not mean he didn’t accept the buck) by claiming he could find no malady within the jurisdiction of his medical-spiritual expertise. This left us back at the gynecologist again.

     And here’s where we throw the curve ball that makes this story worthwhile. I don’t remember if it was me or my wife, but it dawned upon someone that she had recently begun taking birth control pills. At each and every stop along the way, we asked the doctor, in the clearest linguistic way possible, in his native tongue, if it were possible the birth control pills could be causing this horrible descent into bodily hell?

     One thing I’ve learned from this particular foray into medical practice is that doctors really don’t like it when a patient finds the cure. At the end of another round of tests and black magic that continued to leave the lottery unclaimed, we almost insisted with the birth control theory, so much so that the doctor was moved to say, reluctantly, “well, it can’t hurt to try.”

     Three days later she was ready to go back to work. I remember asking myself at the time if this “well, it can’t hurt to try”, means the doctor gets credit for a cure?

     The second true story I’m about to divulge has a ying-yang quality to the incident just told, in that it could be looked upon as the male version of what happened to my ex-wife. Much of this has been chronicled in the essays “Adventures in Capitalism, I”, and “Health Care Revisited”, where the same sickness was used to discuss other things related to America’s pathetic health care system (or lack thereof). Near the end of the second cited essay, I said I was cautiously optimistic, but I never revealed how it all turned out. Now’s the time. (I remind the reader this has all been laid out in much greater detail in the 2 referenced essays.)

     It all started late one night about 6 years ago. I began feeling a burning sensation in my penis and a great desire to pee which could only be consummated in a weak dribble of insatisfaction. As the night wore on, this burning sensation escalated into an unbearable monopolization of all I could think of, as I tossed and turned in bed in an effort to find a position that could mitigate my distress. This was all punctuated by frequent trips to the bathroom where the drips and dribbles of my ordeal did little to relieve me.

     By 4AM (why don’t these things ever happen at a more reasonable hour?) the lights were on in my apartment as I paced the floor, my hand clutching the aggrieved bodily part in a desperate attempt at some salvation. Fifteen minutes later I was knocking at the door of my neighbor, who drove me out to the hospital.

     I spent 5 hours there, primarily hooked up to an intravenous device, as my ex-wife had been. The theory was some kind of stone blockage and by the time I left the hospital, I felt normal again. About 2 months later, at a time when all this had become a moot part of history, the same symptoms returned. Not wanting to throw more money at a cure, I tried the home remedy of drinking huge amounts of water in short amounts of time, in an attempt to “pass” whatever it was that was causing this holocaust of discomfort. I actually had some success with this “treatment”, but the symptoms began to appear more frequently until such a remedy became impractical. I had no choice but to hand myself over to our medical professionals.

     This epic went on for more than a year and could be considered some of the most unbearable physical moments I’ve experienced in my life. The first few rounds of medical attention resulted in a prognosis of inflammation in the urinary tract, accompanied by some swelling which was causing the blockage. Prescriptions, pills, antibiotics, the usual pharmacopeias of modern medical practice. But nah, nah --- it was on to the urologist (a different one from my ex-wife’s experience) and a more in depth examination of the facts. This meant more pills, more tests, more pills, more tests, all culminating in the procedure known as a “cysto”, where you insert something in the bodily organ things are only supposed to come out of. This procedure is the headliner in a urologist’s repertoire.

     And here’s where we throw the curve ball that makes this story worthwhile. At the time, I had been taking a natural supplement called “saw palmetto” to guard against enlargement of the prostate. When asked about my medicinal use by the urologist, I told him I’d been using this substance for about 5 years, a regimen he not only concurred in but admitted to using himself. Two weeks after the “cysto”, and with a timid degree of optimism beginning to take root in my consciousness, my world came crumbling down yet again. My neighbor, noticing my dismay, asked what was wrong? Knowing my use of the aforementioned saw palmetto, he said, “Jerry, why don’t you stop taking it for a week or so, just to see what happens”. His reasoning was that its field of action could not be too far from the place of my pain.

     Within 3 or 4 days, the symptoms were gone, never to return again. Unlike the urologist, my neighbor never sent me a bill.

     The third and last of these true stories revolves around a series of skin problems I’ve had beginning about 20 years ago. For the last 35 years I’ve lived in a tropical environment where the ability to expose bare skin to potent sun is a year round proposition. The temptation to frolic at the beach with the rest of the boys and girls, in various degrees of undress, is one I fell prey to for many years. This has left a not unsubstantial part of my epidermal covering looking and feeling like the skin of a pineapple. I would wholeheartedly recommend future generations of frolicking boys and girls to avoid this trap.

     My latest epidermal skirmish began about 3 years ago. A pink colored disfiguration started sneakily appearing on the upper part of my right thigh, meaning the side in constant eye contact with my face. Its slow but steady growth was impossible not to see. Each time I sat on the toilet, it seemed to be looking up at me and saying, “you are fucked man, you better do something about this.” But it never caused any degree of discomfort and Procrastination won the elections.

     Within a year or so, the pink splotch (it had become a splotch) began to develop a deeper, reddish colored island in the middle of its approximately one square inch territory. The island, which had a fairly regular shape that reminded me of Puerto Rico, eventually grew to about ¼”  by ½”. This development was troublesome and the voice on the toilet continued to say things like, “shmuck! Does this look good to you?” Procrastination was re-elected.

     About 6 months ago, the red island started to --- bleed? Ooze? What it started to do was minutely secrete a viscous substance with a very close relationship to blood, enough that unappealing stains began appearing on my clothes and bed sheets. The toilet voice continued, “hey!! --- “. Oh shut up.

     I began putting band aids on the splotch-island. I would change the covering every 3 days or so, but the viscous stew under the band aid had an ominous look accompanied by a fetid smell. As the weeks went by, like a boxer’s face in the later rounds, it got more and more nasty looking. Procrastination was thrown out of office and my wanderings in the wilderness of professional medicine were renewed.

     Not wanting to drag this condition to Spain, I went to the doctor about 3 weeks before this year’s departure. In truth, I really wanted him to just cut it off, but he had very little idea as to what it was (his humility in admitting this impressed me). It didn’t look like skin cancer, in fact, it didn’t look like anything other than what it looked like. He showed me how to dress it properly with gauze instead of the strangling band aid, and decided to treat it as something fungal-bacterial, meaning the usual array of pills and antibiotics, at such and such a time, in such and such a quantity, with or without food, hither and yon, get the picture? Probably due to the cleaner way of dressing the mess, by the end of the first week there seemed to be some improvement (Puerto Rico might have gotten a little smaller). Moderately encouraged, I went for the one refill, finished it about 3 days before departure and --- no. I bought enough gauze and adhesive tape for my 2 month stay, and resigned myself to a doctor’s visit upon returning, which was good enough to shut the toilet voice up.

     And here’s where we throw the curve ball that makes this story worthwhile. About 10 days into my stay by the Roman Sea, I found myself on the “terraza” that has appeared in this broth of chicken soup philosophy before: reading a book, minding my own business, letting the sweet caress of the Mediterranean environment cloak me in its splendor. I was positioned near a small garden dominated by a huge date palm I’ve known since it was a 3 foot high child. During one of the habitual interludes one takes while reading, I noticed a nice stand of aloe thickly rooted in the shade of the mature palm tree. And that is how this 2 part series “Doctors” was born.

     Three days after directly applying aloe to the splotch-island, I took off the dressing I’d been using and found a Puerto Rico shrunk and withered beyond recognition. Three days more and the scab that had formed was gone, replaced by a crusty layer of pink skin. For the first time in 6 months, there has been no secretions and no need to bandage anything. Some pink disfiguration still exists, and maybe it always will. I’ll take it.

     Post Script: Three months later, and back in the hot, moist tropics where I live, with its sweatier format and more frequent necessity to shower, it has become somewhat evident that the aloe has more masked the problem than cured it. Regardless of what some doctor might try to do, it is my guess that somewhere along the line, this thing will have to be cut off --- and if it gets to the point where I have to see a doctor again, I just wish they’d cut the crap and get on with it.                                                    

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Email: JerryG@postcman.info