My Date with the Doctor

So, I decide that I am going to be totally myself – dress down jeans, turtleneck black top, black runners. If she doesn’t like me, then so be it. After all, a doctor should be the person who might possibly see you at your very worst (unless you're Paris Hilton, I doubt you attend the emergency department totally put together). She should be the most understanding that you might be having the GREATEST BAD HAIR DAY OF your life.

I wait a respectable 25 minutes to see her (I’m inured to the waiting time for doctors – I’m used to cooling my heels in doctors’ waiting rooms for at least an hour with ten year old magazines). I am taken to a vanilla waiting room. I hear my doctor paged to take a phone call from a pharmacy regarding a question on a prescription. So I – unabashedly – eavesdrop. She sounds kind and patient and helpful, a really good sign.

I wait a few more minutes and in comes a fashionably dressed, totally beautiful young woman. I’m thinking she’s another patient assigned to same vanilla waiting room as me. Natch, she is the DOCTOR.

She introduces herself and apologizes for the wait (SHE APOLOGIZES – I’ve never had a doctor apologize to me and I don’t know how to react). I tell her that we are supposed to be like on a blind date and I’m nervous. She laughs and makes me feel completely at ease. She says I have to like her too (I’m now seriously in love).

Now come the questions about me. Marriage. Kids. Career. Then – oh my gosh, she is levelling the tough questions now – Do I smoke? Do I drink? Do I take drugs? We now are the truth-or-dare part of speed dating.

Yes, I smoke. How much? A pack a day. I say, “You probably don’t want to date someone who smokes”. She says, “No, I wouldn’t date them. However, I would be their doctor. I would tell them how they should quit. They would tell me that they will try. They will ignore me and they won’t quit. But, I have to keep telling them because it is my obligation as a doctor.”

I’m now ready to give her a shiny diamond ring and meet her family, because she understands me.

Upshot, I pass. She gives me a prescription for a stop-smoking drug and an appointment to meet her again. She says she looks forward to seeing me again. We schedule a second date..

And, she gives me her phone number!

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I walk out on a cloud. I am worthy to be a patient.