I begin our encounter with what I really feel, "It's not that I don't want to see you, but..."
He agreed it would be far nicer to meet me somewhere outside the hospital. I'll choose to ignore the implication that I am a difficult patient. But I agree it would be nicer to run into him on the street.
On Monday, he removed the bandage. Things has been getting ally itchy, so pulling the giant Band-Aid off the skin (with hair I haven't been able to groom since a) it's covered by a bandage and b) I haven't been allowed to shower) and the attendant pain actually felt almost good. At least it didn't make cry.
And then he started poking around, as he does. Does this hurt? No. This? No. This? No. (Are you seeing a patten here?) He even told me what he was doing. "Now, I'm going to wipe out the wound with some gauze. Tell me if it hurts."
"Have I ever not told you if it hurts?"
"OK? Tell me of it hurts?"
I think his English is great, but he didn't understand my negative sentence construction. I guess he doesn't get so much snark, even from his Western patients.
"Of course I will. I'll scream if it hurts. You know that."
"I like that you are so straight-forward. I don't have to worry about you."
Or something. I forget exactly what he said. (So I should take out the quotes.) But that was the upshot — I don't hide my feelings so he doesn't have to wonder about the pain. When your job includes making decisions based on the physical reactions of your patients, getting an accurate read on those reactions is rather important. (I could say this is the reason why I'm so free with my screams in the ER, but I don't think it is. I don't know, a doctor's office just seems like the one space I can express pain without embarrassment, so I take advantage of the situation. And more than one doctor has told me its OK to scream. And really, if you're going to make me hurt, I'll let you know. So maybe that is the reason. And, I've sad that vocal expressions actually help us deal with pain better.)
So he wraps his scissors in a gauze pad and wipes inside the abscess. I lie there, clutching the pillow I have moved from the other end of the table (because the wound is on my right leg and I have to lie on the table the wrong way so he has access to said abscess), waiting. I even had my face screwed up in a very Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) expression (at least it was in my mind) just waiting for the pain.
And it didn't hurt.
I'll repeat that: It didn't hurt!
So I go back again in a few days to have the dressing changed. He actually took a picture with his own phone to show me just how clean the edges of the wound were. You can see little dots of light and dark indicating that the abscess is knitting itself back together. And it's "clean". I give him him the English: there is no pus. Yes, there is no pus.
We agree to meet on Saturday. And on Saturday, I show up, but he is unavailable. I am disappointed, true. He said he'd text me if surgery came up, but these things happen with doctors. It's OK.
So I wait for the fill-in doctor, who is also Chinese. Sigh.
He walked in and I immediately realized that my impressions about Dr. Li had been entirely correct. This doctor, also a surgeon as far as I know, had that nervous, quiet energy that makes me uncomfortable. He didn't even have to say, "I think you might want to..." for me to not trust him. He pretty much didn't say anything. He didn't ask me any questions. He didn't tell me what he was doing. He flipped through my chart and then started to, well, hurt me.
He was so nervous, he did everything by tweezers, including peeling the tape off of my leg. (I swear Dr. Li pulls off every layer in one fell swoop — this "dude" took off the outer layer, then used alcohol to release the tape, then again, and again.) So when I gave a yelp of pain (because he's pinched my skin with said tweezers) he assumes it's because he's pulled hair (because it's been under a bandage for three weeks) and promises to go slow. Nooooo! Even when I tell him to just pull it off, he doesn't. The nurse even interprets for him, but he never learned how to pull off a Band-Aid: anchor the skin with one hand and pull quickly and firmly with the other.
How I miss my doctor.
It's amazing what three weeks of baring your thigh and bum to a man while screaming and crying in pain will do.
On my way home, I texted Dr. Li. I am going away from Monday to Saturday, but I could check in with him on either of those Sundays (when the surgery clinic is not open at all, so the nice nurses can't schedule an appointment for me). He wrote back that he waited for me at 8:30 as we agreed, but I didn't show.
And then he said his son had thrown a book at him so his eye was all red and tearing. (Yes B, as I said, he is married.) So he could not see me on Sunday, but I needed to see someone.
I would like to say that his story didn't make me laugh, but it did. How many text messages does one receive that end with "Typed with one eye," and are in mediocre English to begin with. And he's my doctor! Who's been making me cry for weeks! It was funny. I wasn't proud walking down the street laughing, but I did laugh. It was the "Typed with one eye" that got me.
Anyway. I replied back that I like sleep far too much to have agreed to an 8:30 appointment on the first day of a holiday; we had said 11:00. However, I had seen another nice man who changed my dressing (I almost told him that he wasn't as nice, but I wasn't sure he would get the joke in text), so we could meet in a week. (The nice nurse is far less able to arrange schedules around my schedule than Dr. Li is, so I would rather arrange with him directly. Not to mention these were the nurses that made me go to the ER to in the first place because they said no one was available until Tuesday — but the ER gave me Dr. Li.) He said it was his fault and apologized.
He returned the text that he would see me on Sunday, but we could arrange a time later in the week.
I agreed, and told him to take care of his eye.
- Do you really care this was posted using BlogPress from my iPad?
Location:Beijing, China
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