JOIN USOnce, I consulted a physician due to a severe throat ache. After an hour’s wait arrived the ENT specialist, and when it was my turn, I complained, “Sir, I find it difficult to swallow because of throat pain.” “Say aaa,” the doctor said. I repeated that single syllable parrot-fashion by opening my jaws slightly.
“Do aaaaa,” he said in a higher pitch, offering me a full view of his uvula. I pronounced the same in a stentorian voice, which probably perforated, but not punctured, his eardrum.
“Arey baba, I want you to open your mouth wide enough for me to see your gullet,” snorted the man, perhaps in his mid-40s, focussing a pen torch into my cakehole.
Scribbling the names of some capsules and syrup on a prescription, he dismissed me. From him I learnt that if an ENT specialist tells a patient to say ‘aaa’, he should open his bazoo wide. With a dermatologist my experience was one of a kind. Having had to scratch my right elbow off and on, I took an appointment with a dermatologist.
Inside, I sat on the buffet stool beside the doctor, scratching my itchy elbow. As I was rolling up my sleeve to show him the itchy spot, he blurted out, “Please don’t do that in front of me,” adding, “If you want to scratch your elbows, go out, do it to the top of your bent, and then come back.”
Biting my lips to hold back a scathing retort, I took the prescription and walked away from him. Later I learnt of him as one to deal with every patient in the same manner. The itch later vanished with a mere smear of an unguent I bought from a pharmacy without having to show the prescription.
The last but not the least of all such bitter experiences and escapades I had with medical specialists was when I had to approach an ophthalmologist to get a teeny speck of wood out of my left eye. Observing my plight, a close pal of mine took me to a private nursing home, where I showed the affected eye to the specialist. Lowering his lens from above the forehead, he looked into it, opening it wide with his digital extremities, and asked me to lie on the cot.
In a jiff I saw him coming out from behind a curtain, an eye dropper in his hand. As he drew the fluid-filled dropper close to my right eye, I shoved his hand away from it. “What are you trying to do?” he enquired irascibly. “You were about to administer the fluid into my right eye, sir. My left eye is irritating,” I explained, and added, “Please don’t blind me totally.”
I could see the attendant nurse stifling a giggle, and my friend, who was beside me till then, quitting the place with laughter. Dabbing my left eye with a bit of wet cotton, I departed tout de suite to seek relief from elsewhere.