To Doc with Love

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are aware of my tonsil issue, which the media has dubbed Tonsilgate.

If you are not a regular reader, you can catch up by clicking here and here. The short and simple version is this: my tonsils were going to be removed by a tap-dancing koala bear on a Venezuelan children’s show.

Actually that would have been preferable.

The real thing is worse. My pre-operative surgery consultation was this: “Drink vanilla milkshakes. Here’s some drugs. Bye!” When I attempted to get an appointment with the surgeon, I was treated as if I asked to father Mitt Romney’s baby. “How dare you, sir! The utter gall to ask about your surgery with the surgeon! Pish-posh, you, crawl back to your hovel and leave our majesty be!”

I was finally able to turn my post-operative appointment into a pre-operative consultation with the doctor, but then I thought Do I really want to see a doctor who saw no trouble leaving my pre-surgery consultation in the hands of the first person he saw walking down the street?

The answer was: Fuck no.

So I’m now with a new ENT. My first appointment was with the nurse practitioner. She actually described the surgery to me.

In case you did not know, they do not use this:

The nurse knew how long it would take. She told me what to do to help recover. She didn’t try to sugarcoat anything. “It’s going to be miserable. It’s going to feel like the worst sore throat you ever had.”

She did not mention vanilla milkshakes.

She actually looked inside my mouth. The other nurse didn’t bother with that part although she did listen to my heart and lungs. In all fairness to her, she likely thought my tonsils were located in my chest cavity.

It turned out, I was sick again. She said I would not be able to have the surgery if I was sick because it increases the chances of bleeding during and post operation. She gave me super amoxicillin. She said my next appointment would be with the doctor because he did not like to feel like a ghost surgeon and actually wanted to meet the people he operated on.

I refrained from enveloping her in a giant bear hug and left.

But I feel like I owe something to that former ENT’s office to say “Hey, thanks for all the weirdness and incompetence because now I’m at a real doctor’s office and it’s really awesome.”

Maybe something like this:

This will be the note attached: “This is the only guy you should operate on.”

Or how about a giant vase of notes, one for each day of the year?

The notes will all say the same thing.

Or maybe since the nurse has such a hard time talking to such a difficult patient, this will make things easier next time:

Or maybe just this will suffice:

Dearest Reader: Speaker7 is attempting to write a post every day in November so she doesn’t have to participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). This is the seventeenth post. She appreciates any and all suggestions unless you recommend she recrap Fifty Shades of Grey. She did that already. And she is stupider for it. 

Advertisements