the doctor is in

while the rest (mostly) of my batchmates are starting their review, i'm at home sick and tired. it started with a sore throat; swallowing became painful. then came the fever on sunday. maybe the trip to the beach saturday night for wenbert's company outing helped trigger it. the fever's been on and off since then. i've had sleepless nights and frequent vomiting. my run-in with bacteria (my tonsils are inflammed) has put me in some frustrating, awkward and well, funny situations.

there's this famous pediatrician and family physician in our town. he's really good. but the joke around town is if a dying patient goes to his clinic, he'll die before the doctor can get to him. see, clinic hours start in the early, or worse, in the late afternoon... patients number up to 50 a day. but this soft-spoken doctor can only attend to an average of about 7 patients per hour. it's not because he has a hard time diagnosing the treatment; he's considered the best for miles, after all. it's because he likes to make small talk, that well, usually stretches longer than the shores of liloan. so i was there last monday. i was patient #35. from 2 p.m. till 5 p.m., it was still at patient #23. i returned at 8:30 p.m. just in time for the doctor to take a break and eat dinner. it was already patient #30, so i hung around. it was 9:15 and still the doctor was out. then he had a personal visitor and frustrated, i resigned to my fate. i went home.

today, i went to another doctor, still in my town. he's younger and absolutely less experienced. but i had to settle for him than suffer longer. i got there and in the receiving room, i found this 40ish guy in jeans and shirt talking animatedly with this old man. i came in and sat down opposite them. while they talked, i realized that the younger man was "the" doctor. it felt rude to interrupt so again, i waited. but when 20 akward minutes passed just looking at them, i couldn't take any more of it, so i said, "doc, do you want me to come back later?" then he said, "oh, i thought you were this old man's daughter. i didn't know you were a patient."

turns out it was my blooper after all. but i really thought he and this man knew each other since way back because they kept saying "there in our place" and they talked about common acquaintances. and when i came in, the secretary didn't say anything. anyway, i hope his diagnosis is not a blooper.