Dermatologist gets under my skin
I had an early appointment this morning with my dermatologist, whom I’ve seen only once before. That was six weeks ago, and he was very personable. We talked about Ohio and where I went to college, what brought me to Utah, plus his own background and experience in struggling to start a family.
It was a complete change from my other experiences with dermatologists, who have been very clinical and barely interested in me as a person. You know, the typical doctor—treat the symptoms, not the patient. This new Dr. B is probably close to retirement, so being part of an older generation with a small office mentality may contribute to his excellent bedside manner. It’s probably also his personality.
Well, this morning’s appointment was tougher than the first (pain-wise), and I was glad that my new dermatologist was friendly and caring. I was a little miffed, though, because he asked questions that made it clear he didn’t remember much of anything we’d talked about only six weeks ago—what brought you to Utah, do you have any children, etc. At no point did any of my answers seem to remind him of our previous conversation.
The bizarreness of answering the same questions made me start imagining a life in which everyone but me had long-term memory loss, and conversations among people were rarely fresh. What would happen to me, the one person who could remember everything? Would I go crazy? Maybe the reason that I could remember is because I was the only person who didn’t drink the water or eat the tainted fish (a la Airplane!).
Weird fantasy worlds aside (have I been watching too much Scrubs?), I wonder if Dr. B will ask me the same ones again next time. He's a good doctor otherwise. His male nurse/assistant is roughly my age and surely remembered the previous conversations for which he was present, but he didn’t say anything.
I’m a couple thousand words behind on NaNoWriMo, but I stayed up last night to make sure I at least didn’t fall any further behind. Current word count: 6,955. I’m flying out tomorrow morning to visit Ben’s family and my mom in Ohio for a few days and hope to have some quiet writing time while I’m there.
