Finding a new medical doctor
I have my appointment with a new doctor. The reason I need a new doctor is because I have fired my old doctor. He doesn’t know I’ve fired him, because he’s not in touch with me, which is the whole problem. I had called him to tell him that my gynecologist had called me to say I had cancer, and I left him a message saying, “Please call me. It is very important,” and he never did. So I never went back to him. I went to his office once to pick up my records, hoping he would come out and ask why I was leaving him — he knew I’d be coming, after all, because I’d had to call ahead. But he didn’t come out, so I couldn’t give him the speech I’d planned to give in front of all the other people in the waiting room, about how the pain I had complained about to him — twice — is just the kind of pain that often precedes this cancer.
Anyway, I have my appointment with my possible new doctor, a woman, and in the waiting room before meeting her, I have filled out what seemed to be 47 pages of questions about myself, including — on the first page, the third question, right near the top — “Do you have any diseases at the present time?” And I have written my condition in big letters, so she can’t miss it.
The nurse takes the form I’ve completed to the doctor, and then I wait a long time — during which, presumably, the doctor gets a chance to look at it — and then I go in to meet her. She smiles; she seems friendly enough but a little rushed, and she says, “So, how’s your health?”
Oh. How awful!
“Well,” I say, “as you can see on the form, I have ovarian cancer.” She looks at me, and then at the form. “Oh!” she says. “How awful!”
Not long ago — a year after I finished my treatment — a former colleague called me. “I hadn’t heard from you in such a long time, I was starting to get worried,” he says. “A friend of mine just died of the same kind of cancer you have. And she was only 51. How old are you?”
“I’m 51,” I say.
“And you’re fine, right?”
Yes, yes, I’m fine, I think, and thank you for making my day.
I have become a scholar of the insensitive things people say. “You’re done with all that, right?” people ask me. “You’re done, you’re all done, that’s all done. Done done done done.” I feel like a cake. I’m done, I’m cooked, I’m baked. Like a cake, and like — what else? Oh, yes — a dead person. In a way, there’s no pleasing me: I am also a scholar of things people don’t say. I wrote an article once about how people have stopped asking me anything at all about my illness, how lonely I feel because everyone has moved on to other concerns and I’m still living every minute terrified that I’m going to get sick again.
My oldest friend’s husband called me to tell me how much he liked my article and how he identified with it, how he had felt the same way after his sister died. Your sister died? I thought. Man, I forgot all about that in about three seconds.
