There is a funky power play in a doctor’s office, if you ask me. The visit is about YOU and you are paying your doctor, yet there is always an element of fear for me. Maybe a fear of being judged or a fear of being found out (how many times just yesterday was I above 200?) and we won’t even START with the required weigh-in each time I’m there. So even though I’m the ever-important subject of the visit, and everyone else would be worthless without my presence, they still hold all the cards.
So really, it’s just odd and for me, rather unpleasant.
And then there’s the privacy element that turns our sense of normalcy on its head. Get there, sit and wait. Someone you’ve never seen before opens a door, mispronounces your name and you holler out and hop up “That’s me!” and then you follow that person back into a winding maze of hallways until you reach the weigh-in station or until you’re shut inside a new room.
If it’s an endocrinology office, you get to sit and stare at a poster of the endocrine system, or a poster of an endocrine related disorder. (My favorite poster from a few doctors’ back had this one of hyperthyroidism; that poor person had the saddest expression and the biggest eyes! But I digress.)
So you are left alone in a room. For whoever knows how long. And that room has all kinds of cupboards and drawers and papers. (I’m a big—huge—believer in opening those drawers after a certain amount of time. I can restrain myself for a good 45 minutes, but beyond that, I think they are fair game.)
But what is never EVER in that room? Your medical chart.
That is what to me is the most interesting part—what someone has said about ME. Never have I claimed to have a small ego, and the entire point of the visit is for ME to share things about ME with someone else, who in turns writes down either what I’ve said, or what their interpretation is of what I’ve reported.
Yet they never let me see what they’ve written.
Working for doctors for twelve years and working with medical charts for just as long, I know for a fact that very very few of them are at all interesting. Yet that knowledge doesn’t really help. I want to see it!!
Yet I’m not willing to request a copy; I know it isn’t that interesting.
But I still wonder.
