| When our local health-care provider recently cancelled its contract with the Medicare server, which we had subscribed to for a number of years, we were forced to find a new provider, which was located in a different town, twenty miles away.
I had two choices for doctor. One was a youngish guy who looks like the weatherman on local TV, a Clark Gable type who flies his own plane, climbs mountains, fly-fishes and hunts moose in Alaska. This doctor just looks like that. Actually, all I know about him is that after he got out of some medical school he did time in the Navy and now he is mostly interested in pediatrics. I didn’t hire him.
My other choice was an osteopath who had also joined the Navy for his advanced training. His little bio sheet put Family Health Care ahead of Pediatrics so I took him.
I really wanted someone interested in geriatrics since I am one.
On my “Getting to Know You” visit, I first had to get to know the doctor’s assistant who took my temperature, counted my pulse and sphygmomanometerized me. “Like a teen-ager,” she confided, then assured me that the doctor would be with me in a few minutes.
I read several issues of Sports Illustrated and browsed some pamphlets on Mammography; Herpes Simplex; Post Partums; Past Participles; Parturition; Pan Theism and was amusing myself with a four-piece jigsaw puzzle of a sick-looking purple monster when the doctor came in.
“I’m Doctor Blank, Mr—-” he had to look at the chart for my surname then promptly mispronounced it. I thought maybe his assistant should have cued him. He offered his hand in friendship but his grip was so light I gathered he was afraid I’d injure it.
He asked me what seemed to be my problem and I thought maybe his assistant should have told him: that this was just “Getting To Know You,” establishing the doctor-patient relationship etc., more or less a social call.
I decided that since he was the doctor he should tell me what my problem
Was. I told him I was bothered with Unsightly Nasal Hair (that condition often described in pulp-magazines which advertise a kind of tiny weed-eater). He knit his brows, dropped one and purled two. He pulled down the lower lid of my left eye and left it down. He jammed that little instrument with a light in it into my right ear and I felt the water left over from my shower trickling out my left ear: that was a plus. He did the knee-jerk thing with the little rubber hammer and I kicked over his wastebasket. He ran his thumbs up and down my cervical vertebrae and when I winced he put a Full Nelson on me and my spinal column sounded like walnuts cracking.
I gasped that I hadn’t really expected to get a treatment and he said, “Man! You’re really out of shape!” And I said should I see a chiropractor or something and he said, “No, don’t let anyone touch that back of yours.” I thought, geez! What did he just do to me?
He said, “We should schedule you for a full physical, run a blood, x-rays, prostrate, all those things.”
I said what about my unsightly nasal hair? And he said, “Well, you know, we really don’t deal with that sort of thing. But I have seen a thing advertised in the pulp magazines, looks kind of like a tiny weed-eater.”
John C. Pennell
Bainbridge Island. | 
