Docs

It is a fact that Peggy loves her doctors and they, her. That’s a lot of loving. I count eight plus her dentist. Last week we saw six of them which adds up to many National Geographic and Sport Illustrated magazines in waiting rooms. Fortunately we’ve both learned to never leave home without our library books.

As far as I can sniff out all her doctors voted for Trump. That doesn’t make them bad persons, just in a brotherhood / sisterhood of self-serving, misguided professionals. It's almost comical watching them contort their brain trying to defend what is indefensible. I wouldn’t put any of them in the Ben Carson column who has somehow managed to have compartmentalized his brain so all his reputed smarts are crowded into one corner while all the rest of his synapses border on the imbecilic.

Do no harm, seems to have eluded them in terms of their political preference. In a brief conversation with the urologist he defended his vote with a grievance about all the many regulations he now has to meet. I suppose a urologist has a right to be pissed.

But I’ve gone astray. I really didn’t intend to move to the unmentionable one. I want to tell about the astonishing way, which I bear witness to, Peggy has with her otherwise good doctors. All are on a first-name basis and most get hugs and kisses upon entering the examining room. The exchange feels like a social call. The conversation might be about poetry, even if they hadn’t read a poem in 40 years. Or an inquiry about their family. Or where they might be traveling this summer. Almost forgotten is why we are there.

A few days ago the issue of creativity came up. The good doctor said he reads only detective stories outside of medical literature. He agreed how he likes resolution in an otherwise inexplicable world. The illusion of closure can’t hurt. As for being creative he felt one either had it or not. We disagreed but one doesn’t argue with the person burning off a pre-cancerous eruption or the guy prescribing an I.V. infusion.

Another doctor is a reader of real literature but told how he is stuck with Joyce’s, Ulysses. Peggy offered some tips. With still another the talk is of bird-watching and his striking photography which adorns the walls. Peggy writes poems for her doctors, some nurses, and Friday even wrote one for a woman waiting while her husband was also receiving an I.V. drip. She was struck by the woman’s generosity and good nature.

When I see my doctors, I’m ashamed to say, the transaction is all about me. I want answers even if there are none. I have no idea how they voted though, I suspect, it was not for Donald since I go to Kaiser. Their staff is less threatened by all those imagined demons Obama had set upon them and their bottom line is not affected one way or the other by our recent regime change. 

Peggy’s way of being is not a calculated strategy but her natural openness which resets the usual doctor-patient relationship. I can see their eyes light up when they see her. It is as if they are with an old friend. 

Her docs have seen her through nearly 96 years. She gets the best of them by offering the best of herself. There is a healing in the interchange.