Haven't Got Time for the Sprain

There is absolutely nothing pleasant about visiting the doctor's office. First, the waiting room, where the minimum wait time is fifteen minutes. That's a generous assumption, at that. Let's have a look around the waiting room. My doctor is a "family" doctor, which usually means there are at least three kids of various ages, with their parents, in the waiting room. Each child is sicker than the next. One has a dripping nose. One is picking their dripping nose. And one looks like he could possibly be suffering from mad cow disease. On the other end of the spectrum, we have your average, every day old person also waiting to see the doctor. Today, granny is accompanied by her daughter, who is easily pushing sixty herself. They call her -- "Edna? .... Edna?" and several seconds elapse before the daughter realizes they are calling her mother's name. She helps mom out of her chair and they shuffle into the office. And directly across from me is smoker guy, who looks like he may have parked his eighteen wheeler in the lot, and who must have recently bathed in an industrial-sized ashtray.

Blissfully my name is called after only about 20 minutes. But then I have to put in another 15 inside the doctor's exam room. AFTER they weigh me. WITH my clothes and shoes on, which means I obsess for the next 15 minutes about how much I weigh.

Finally the doctor comes in to see me and pokes and prods at my wrist, bends it like beckham, and pronounces it to be sprained. Well, if it wasn't prior to my coming to his office, it most certainly is now. But he makes up for it by giving me some foil-wrapped sample packs of some newfangled kind of painkiller. This means he has spared me a trip to another most-dreaded place: the pharmacy. Thanks, doc. Job well done.