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I have been ill these past few days.
At first, I thought I’d come down with a bad case of Trumpitis after watching that sad sack of orange dog sick and his lounge lizard lackey ambush the president of Ukraine.
Then I decided I was merely hungover. The symptoms were the same. Dizzy, unexplained bruises, swollen groin glands.
But nobody’s hangover lasts for three days, not even after a binge registering nine on the Retchter scale.
Choosing a doctor is not simply a question of opening the phone book, closing your eyes and slamming a steak knife into the page.
The gender of the doctor is important since there will be a fair amount of lying down and a general loosening of clothing, often from the patient’s side.
Would one rather have one’s willy inspected by a man or a lady doctor?
Not that there was any need for a willy inspection in this case.
However, an inordinate number of medical practitioners seem to think that all illnesses can be traced to the male member.
You go in to have your bunion massaged and the next thing you know, the podiatrist has his hand down your trousers and is asking you to cough.
I have never been fully comfortable with strange men handling my privates, regardless of where they went to school.
As it turned out, I chose a lady doctor because she was the only one who could fit me in before 2028.
“Will 9am be okay?” said the receptionist.
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“Do I have a choice?”
“Yes, sir. You have the choice of not seeing the doctor and dying, if you prefer.”
“Nine will be fine.”
A doctors’ waiting room is my personal Room 101.
Obscure Orwellian references aside, I have a powerful loathing for the places.
Waiting is what other people do. I lack the temperament and humility to wait.
If a queue is longer than two people, I walk away. As a result, I often go without food for days.
There was someone in there already. With a baby.
The mother yakked, the doctor murmured, the baby did that terrible thing that babies do.
By the time they finished, the baby was old enough to have children of its own.
“What ails thee, squire?” the doctor asked me.
What? Had I had been in the waiting room for so long that time had come full circle and we were back in the Elizabethan era?
“Physician, I fear ’tis a touch of the bubonic plague,” I said, praying she would end this Shakespearean farce before bringing out the costumes and forcing me to reenact something disturbing from Macbeth.
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She told me to hop up onto the bed.
Had she not noticed that I was 1.94m tall? Were I to hop, I would smash through the dry wall and land in the corridor.
I lowered myself onto the bed like a giraffe at a drinking hole and began undoing my pants.
“No need for that,” she said, her voice heavy with regret.
However, she wasn’t going to let me escape without a fondle at the very least.
Her slender hand disappeared up my shorts.
Poking around in my groin, she looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s very big.”
I blushed and turned away. “Why, thank you, doctor.”
She looked at me as if I were an imbecile. “Your gland. It’s swollen.”
She asked me to do what all doctors ask, whether you are there for a flu jab or to have your face stitched back on.
I went off and returned with the cup overflowing.
Three drops, apparently, would have been sufficient.
Her litmus paper turned into a rainbow, then settled on the colour of a squashed tick.
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She shook her head. When doctors shake their heads right after conducting a test, you might as well kill yourself.
I scanned her desk for a scalpel. Nothing.
Maybe I could gouge my eyes out with the edge of her platinum picture frame. Maybe not.
I doubted she could take much more of my vitreous humour. That’s a joke for the ophthalmologists.
“It’s your kidneys,” she said.
Oh dear. Who will give me one of their kidneys? I have offended everyone I know.
I am going to have to get in touch with someone who works for one of the organ smuggling syndicates.
I shall visit the Chinese takeaway tonight. Get one crispy duck with hoisin sauce and make a few discreet inquiries.
“An infection,” she said. “Nothing too serious.”
She agreed that I probably picked it up surfing at one of our E. coli-riddled beaches.
“That’s good,” I said. “I bet people like Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus get their kidney infections from doing far less wholesome things than surfing.”
She opened the door.
“Are you sure you don’t want to see my …”
“Goodbye,” she said. “You can pay on your way out.”
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