I hate hospitals and doctor’s offices. I hate how clean and sterile and smelly they are, and how quiet, and how full of disgusting, coughing, wheezing sick people. I hate waiting rooms and their bad magazine selection and their germ-covered furniture. But most of all, I hate doctors.
Luckily, I haven’t had to deal with doctors very much. I never get sick, and even if I did I’d stay at home and sleep like a sane person instead of hanging out in a waiting room for hours spreading my germs around. I have never been on medication for anything. I don’t remember the last time I had a cold. I haven’t even met my family doctor, and I’ve lived in the same city for eight years now. Doctors aren’t really something I’ve had to deal with.
But all that changed when I broke my arm.
I went out to a bar with some friends early this summer, and after consuming five long island iced teas and a shot of tequila, I attempted to get up on a stage and
dance
. I promptly fell, landing on my right arm. It hurt. Quite a lot, in fact.
I picked myself up off the floor and suffered alone, slumped on a barstool, until my friends were finished dancing. They then took me home, where I managed to unlock my door with my left hand (try it, it’s not easy). I then attempted to get ready for bed, and I did okay until it came time to change into my pyjama top. I couldn’t get my arm into it, and it hurt a lot. I started to cry, something I never do. My mom came in to see if I was okay, and was very worried to see me alone and crying in the dark. I convinced her I was okay, that it was just a sprain, and that I was tired. I was still semi-drunk, so she decided to let me sleep and see how my arm was in the morning.
I woke up the next morning, and my arm HURT LIKE HELL. It was also a very unattractive shade of purple. Mom took one look at it and decided that I needed to see a doctor.
So we went to outpatients. We arrived in the waiting room and were told that we’d probably have to wait for about an hour. I slumped in a chair in front of the tv, which was tuned to PBS and playing Sesame Street. I hated Sesame Street when I was a kid, and I detest it now. I made Mom change the station to MuchMusic, which must have been having a theme day or something, because all that was on were horrible rap or even more horrible 80's metal videos. I decided to read instead.
Two hours, a couple magazines and a bad Sherlock Holmes novel later, the doctor was finally ready to see me. Oh, sorry, did I say ready to see me? I meant that he was ready to move me into an examining room (with no magazines to read, I might add), where I had to wait for another hour. Finally he really was ready to see me. He took my arm, looked at it, ordered me to wiggle my fingers, and told me it didn’t look broken. He decided to send me for x-rays anyway.
So I went upstairs to the x-ray waiting room. I waited for a half hour to get some nice pictures taken of my bones, a process that took less than five minutes. Mom and I opened the folder containing my x-rays on the way down in the elevator, but we couldn’t tell anything from them.
Now, you’d think that, since I’d already spent three and a half hours waiting, I’d get to go right back in to the doctor, right? Wrong. I waited for another half hour for the doctor to examine the x-rays. He finally informed me that I had two broken bones and that I’d have to have a cast put on.
So we went into the cast room. He told me that, once the cast was on, my arm would stop hurting. He then proceeded to wrap my arm in yards and yards of wet stretchy gauze, which hardened into a lovely lightweight cast. My arm still hurt, which reinforced my belief that the doctor was a stupid idiot, but finally my ordeal was over and I was free to leave.
But was my ordeal really over, you ask? Ha ha ha, no. I went home, made a couple phone calls, put on my pyjamas and settled down to watch tv. And then my arm started to feel like it was being squeezed. It felt like someone had placed it in a carpenter’s vise and was slowly turning the crank. My fingers started to look a little blue. “Mom,” I called wearily, “I have to go back to the hospital.”
So we did. I went in my pyjamas. By this time I didn’t give a damn if the hottest guy in school was sitting in that waiting room and saw me in my pyjamas with unbrushed hair. I just wanted to get that horrible, tight cast off.
Mom and I went up to the receptionist to tell her what was wrong. She looked at my arm, and, in her obviously expert opinion, told my mother, “her fingers don’t look blue. I don’t think her circulation is cut off. That cast isn’t too tight.”
I resented her patronizing tone and the fact that she addressed my mother instead of me. What am I, 8?
“Why does my arm still hurt, then?” I snarled.
The receptionist sighed. “It’ll be a few minutes till the doctor can see you,” she said.
Of course that “few minutes” stretched into an hour. Finally I was back in the office with the same, tired doctor. He looked at my arm. He examined my fingers. “That cast isn’t too tight,” he said.
I assured the idiot that yes, it was too tight, and I should know; it was my arm being wrung out like a wet sponge in there. So he finally agreed to cut the cast off and put on a new, looser one.
He got his supplies, which consisted of a flat, long, skinny sheet of metal with a wooden handle, which is slid between the arm and the cast to protect the arm, a miniature crowbar thing that is used to pry the cast off, and the, uh, cast saw.
The cast saw is scary. It looks like any old saw, except it has no blades - it’s just a circular metal wheel that gets really hot and vibrates and burns through the plaster cast.
Anyway. The doctor tried to slide the metal thing under my cast. It wouldn’t fit. That’s right, that flat metal sheet was too thick to fit between my arm and that big, loose, comfortable cast. “Huh,” the doctor said. “Maybe this cast is too tight.”
“No shit,” I hissed under my breath.
So the nice, competent, professional doctor decided to burn through the cast without the protection of the flat metal thing. It was okay at first. The vibrations hurt my broken arm a little, but...
“OW!” I roared, as I felt the hot vibrating saw sear my flesh. “That burned me!”
“No, it can’t have,” the retarded excuse for a medical professional told me. “It’s not hot enough to burn your skin.”
“But I felt it!” I protested.
“You’re not one of those people that handles pain well, are you?” The moron asked, in what I took to be a mocking tone.
“It burned me,” I hissed. But I tried to remain silent as he finished burning the cast off. I couldn’t help whimpering a couple times when he held the saw on my poor shattered arm too long, though. I was exhausted and in pain and grouchy and being burned and I just wanted to go home.
Finally the quack had cut a deep line through the cast. He grabbed the little crowbar and tried to gently pry the cast off. Heh, did I say “gently?” My mistake. He was about as gentle as a drunk linebacker. In boxing gloves. In any case, the cast would not come off, no matter how much he wrestled with it.
So he had to cut another line through the cast, and burn me some more (I think he was getting some kind of sadistic pleasure out of watching me suffer), and finally the cast came off. My arm looked very red and blotchy, and had some nice little red burn lines running up it, right where he had been sawing. Coincidence, I’m sure.
I immediately rubbed at the red lines and glowered up at the dumbass doctor. I can look pretty bitchy when I want to, and I’ve been told that I have a great evil look, so I’m sure that was something. But of course he didn’t apologize for burning my skin, or even really acknowledge that I’d been burned. He just blamed the too-tight cast on some new brand of gauze or something, wrapped my arm up all over again (much looser this time), and finally told me I could go home.
Yes, this time it was really over. But my arm still hurt for weeks afterwards, and the cast was a little too loose, and I think one of the bones had been moved out of place during the sawing and prying, because now that the cast is off my arm looks a tiny bit wrong and still hurts when I try to swing a golf club or open a heavy door. But it was over, and I was free, and I am never going to the hospital again.
