I'd almost rather ignore my foot until it falls off

On the off chance that some professional big-city-doctor-type reads this blog, perhaps you can help clear something up for me: Why is it that without fail, each time I've gone to the doctor here, I've been kept sitting in the waiting area for about 45 minutes, for a check of some body part that, beginning to end, the doctor spends only 5 minutes performing?

Yesterday it was the foot doctor. I have this little thing on the top of my left foot -- a node, a nubbin, a wee growth. It started out a pinprick of a bump about four years ago, but in the past year or so has become noticeably larger. When I walk, it asserts pressure. After a long day of running around or a night of dancing, it goes into dull-throb mode. All along I've known I should have a doctor check it out, but I've been putting it off and putting it off because I despise going to the doctor.

I'm a reasonable person. I know the doctor is there to help, that I pay into health insurance to take advantage of the doctor's help, and so on. But the experience of visiting the doctor is always so angsty, not just because of the knowledge that in going, you might find out something is horribly wrong, but because the entire ordeal of hauling yourself in to be told to wait and wait and wait and wait and come here, quickly, and strip and sit back and extend and stand and walk in place and turn and ambiguous "hmmm" -- it's so demoralizing.

Yesterday, at least, the "strip" part was not required, since all I had to do was bare my feet and ankles. The doc (when he finally saw me) pressed down and told me what I already knew ("Well, it's definitely part of the bone"), then took part of my foot in each hand and flexed it back and forth to feel where things might be rubbing each other the wrong way. The nub's most likely cause: a loosed ligament, allowing the bones on either side of the joint to do a raunchier bump-and-grind than is recommended, resulting in the slow buildup of a bony ridge. Imagine two tectonic plates colliding -- a minor (but persistent) Himalaying of the metatarsals.

The solution (which I also already knew): get an X-ray (to rule out a bone tumor, something this is highly unlikely to be since the bump took so long to grow) and return to be fitted for orthotics -- those things I wore way back in the ballet-dancing days to tame my pronating ankles. Now I must tame my bulging bones, to the tune of several hundred dollars.

But back to the whole From Here to Waiting-Room Eternity situation...

Let's assume I'm an average patient. And let's even round it up a bit and assume the checkup of the average patient takes 15 minutes instead of 5. Even then, doctors, if you're scheduling patients in half-hour increments, that's quite a nice cushion to do whatever it is you do to fill the time in between -- paperwork, eating an apple, playing a round of Tetris, snogging your secretary.

I would also like to suggest, doctors, that if you do keep a patient waiting for that long -- a patient who does, even if you don't seem to realize it, have better things to be doing than flipping through outdated magazines in your waiting room for 45 minutes -- perhaps consider extending some sort of courtesy to make up for it. Offer the afflicted a high-end chocolate truffle, say. Or a gift certificate for a 15-minute back rub. Or waive the co-pay. You did after all suck up your patient's time, time that patient could have spent earning the price of the co-pay and then some. Or time the patient could have spent dispatching of the co-pay on something more pleasurable, like a half-dozen oysters or a nice glass of wine.

Or hell, assuming the patient hasn't come in for blood work or some sort of gastroenterological thing, have some wine and oysters set up in the lounge. Even if the wait is annoying, at least the noshing will help take the edge off.

Comments

[John Stanforth]

Read somewhere the other day that 1.7m Americans get infections from hospital and doctors visits each year, and that 99,000 of these people die. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, in that context, the oyster buffet is not the best way to make a doctors office more pleasant. :-)

Then again, with ~300,000 adverse drug reaction deaths and some crazy number of fatal surgery mistakes (like, removing the left lung instead of the right... oops!), who knows... maybe a good "last meal" is the least they can do.