Is There A Doctor In The House?

I’ve been going to the same general practitioner for nearly twenty years. He’s a very odd man; and normally begins each appointment with me by telling me what’s wrong with him.

This week’s visit was no different. "Oh, I have this pain in my shoulder,” he said. "I go swimming, and it doesn’t hurt when I go swimming but when I wake up the next morning… Oh, man that hurts.” All the while he’s rubbing at this spot in his shoulder that’s been bugging him. “So that’s why I’m glad that this summer’s almost over so I can stop swimming.”

“Why don’t you join a gym so you can keep swimming?” I said. Which sounded logical to me. There are lots of doctors and gym, and some have ridiculous hours. Both the doctor and the gym.

“Yeah but who am I kidding,” he said. “I’m up at 5:30, don’t get home until 6:30, and at lunch I’m really hungry and need to eat.” I start wondering if maybe I should see somebody else instead. But he’s helped me lot, and it’s been real interesting to see his growth for the past 20 years.

“Anyway,” he says, “what’s wrong with you?”

I tell him about my elbows. About when the pain started, when it hurts, what makes it hurt, etc. While I’m talking, he turns his back and takes a very large manual out of the cupboard. If you’ve never seen a physician’s desk reference (usually called the PDR), is about the size of your average microwave. I’m thinking, oh great, once again I have something so strange he’s got to look it up. But no. It’s much worse than that. He holds the book out to me grasped by one spidery hand, tells me to hold out my right hand, and take it from him.

I just look at him like he just asked me to pick up the Statue of Liberty.

Whatever, I think, and take it from him. “That hurts,” I tell him, sagging under its weight. Then he asked me to hold it with my hand going in the other way, and then comes the worst part. He wants me to the same thing with my left hand (that arm is the one that’s been hurting more).

“That hurts a lot more,” I tell him, gritting my teeth and sagging under its weight.

“You have tennis elbow,” he tells me. So much for scientific diagnostics.

And this is only one reason why he’s an interesting guy. He’s also gone a little more anti-meds than he used to be. Now he’s into stretching as the cure for everything.

“Now here’s what you do,” he said. He then showed me a series of very scary looking, very intense looking, and not very fibro-friendly stretches.

And had expected me to do them three times a day. Including mashing the lights out of anything that hurts.

Afterward, I went to work out at my physical therapist’s. I asked him about the stretching and the mashing, including the physician’s opinion that the weight regimen (extremely light and wimpy one pound weights) that the physical therapist had put me on would only make the situation worse. The physical therapist disagreed. This makes me crazy. Sometimes I want to get all of them in a room, give them a pot of coffee and half an hour, then come out with three alternatives for me to choose among. So during my workout I let my doctor’s advice and the PT’s advice duke it out in my head. My gut told me to go with the weights. After all, a PT treats more cases of tendonitis than a doctor in any one year. Plus the idea of all that mashing gives me the heebie-jeebies.

All I can do is make the best decision for me.