Doctor, doctor, gimme the news...

It takes a special kind of person to become a physician. Not because of the intense schooling involved, or a career devoted to peoples’ health, although those factors are certainly worthy of mention. No, the real wondrous feat of these folks is adherence to the rule of doctor-patient confidentiality, the ability to not blab to their friends about all the strange things they see at the office, like weird moles, and birthmarks shaped like the Horn of Africa.

 

This is how I know I’m not cut out for it. I’d squeal like a little piggy. “Hey Chaz, you’ll never guess what I saw on someone’s inner thigh today! Vericose veins that spell out the preamble to the Declaration of Independence!”

 

Bet it’s happened.

 

Unlike me, the vast majority of physicians aren’t schmucky, immature man-children, so “the mum rule,” as I like to call it, is a welcoming blanket of comfort. Without it, check-ups would just be way too creepy. There’d be nothing distinguishing an annual physical from the cavity probing they give you when you get tossed in the slammer. Except, after a doctor’s visit, you can at least cry out your shame in the car, as opposed to a cell with a busted toilet and a cellmate named Brick.

 

The mum rule, aside from upholding the twin pillars of tact and decency, is perhaps the one aspect of a physical that allows a person to continue feeling like a real human being through the whole process, as opposed to underperforming livestock. Humans are indeed an animal species, but we don’t like to be reminded of that, so we concoct ways to distance ourselves from other mammals, like wearing clothes and memorizing Weird Al lyrics. Getting poked by a finger wrapped in latex is the closest we get to acknowledging our animal roots, followed closely by sex and bare-knuckle boxing. Activities which should never be combined, by the way.

 

The reason all this comes to mind is that my own annual physical is mere weeks away, and while I’ve no reason to sweat – I’m a gooshy marshmallow, but otherwise a passable specimen – the thought of going through the whole process brings to mind past physicals, which merge in the memory into a disconcerting melange of forced nudity and foreign appliances. And what appliances they are. If a doctor’s various tools were all laid out on a table end to end, it’d be hard to tell if they were medical apparatuses or the instruments seized by police in the busting of a high-tech meth lab.

 

These intimidating devices also accomplish the uncomfortable goal of reminding us of the frailty of our own biological processes. When you’re sitting at your desk at work, you generally don’t think about your heart beating, or the various fluids slooshing through you at all times. Those are behind-the-scenes phenomena, the set designers and lighting gurus that allow you, the actor, a stage on which to stand. They work best in the dark. 

 

A doctor’s office is a spotlight revealing all, and it usually starts with the blood pressure screening, whereby a nurse or doctor’s assistant straps your arm into a sling that was once used to strangle dissidents in a Soviet gulag. In many respects, it’s the simplest and least offensive part of the whole deal – someone gives a few quick pumps on a plastic squeeze-thingie, checks a watch, releases the pressure, checks the watch again. To see them do it, you’d think they were running diagnostics tests on a race car engine. 

 

Easy stuff, but I always think about what’s actually going on in my arm when this is happening; the blood being cut off, then the slow trickle back into a full flow. It makes my arm feel tenuous and unsubstantial. We think we’re made of steel until something happens to remind us that, actually, the body is about as sturdy in the face of hardship as a weepy animal-rights activist at a screening of “Free Willy.”

 

But all that is warm-up, of course. The mum rule exists, essentially, for two reasons: To protect your sensitive health information, and to mitigate, as much as possible, the awkwardness of getting naked and showing your genitals to a stranger in a mask. Unless you’re a swinger in Amsterdam, this is a highly unusual activity. When the first proto-humans were walking upright on the Saharan plains, do you think there were members of their little societies whose purpose was to examine everyone else’s junk in a non-sexual, clinical setting? I would think not. As a species, we just haven’t evolved sufficiently to feel comfortable with that kind of thing. Generally speaking, if there’s somebody down in my area, it’s because we know each other personally and I bought her dinner first. Every time I have a physical I feel like I should bring a long-stemmed rose and a bottle of wine.

 

It’s rather obvious to point out that people should get check-ups as often as possible – particularly women, whose complex biology allows more opportunities for system failure than the control panel of a NASA module. It’s an odd experience nevertheless, and it doesn’t get less odd with time. If anything, it gets odder. Our bodies have limited shelf lives, and the longer they’ve been running, the more they need specialized attention given to various problem areas. That assertion should ring true for anyone who’s had a colonoscopy, which is probably the closest humankind has ever come to those invasive alien probes you hear about from wide-eyed farmers and shut-ins. Come to think of it, I suppose it’s technically possible that there exists a race of bug-eyed galaxy surfers, green men who exist solely to abduct isolated whack-jobs and give them routine colon exams.

 

It’s a marker of immaturity that the only reason I’d consider becoming a doctor would be to voyeuristically scope out peoples’ eye-popping abnormalities. The stories, I’m sure, would be endless, and I’d have to start a blog just to keep track of them all. Which would have repercussions. A justifiably vindictive patient would see fit to expose my own fear of needles, which make me squirm like a nun at a screening of “Caligula.” 

 

That’s why I’m sitting on the exam table and not wielding the stethoscope. Good thing mum’s the word.