A visit to Dr. Edward Shen, a brilliant cardiologist of many interests who’s kept my heart beating in reasonably regular rhythm for 30 years, got me ruminating about the origins of this column.
It was 1995, and I realized medical issues wouldn’t allow me the stamina to make it to retirement as managing editor of the newspaper, so decided I’d better reestablish myself as a writer if I wanted to keep working.
The first Volcanic Ash column concerned an emergency room visit for the heart disorder that led me to Dr. Shen, and got me wondering why medical folk so often refer to us by our diseases, instruments of injury and body parts instead of our names.
As when I needed an X-ray for a broken toe and asked the nurse the wait time. She yelled to the X-ray tech, “How long for The Toe?”
“The Lung and The Kidney Stone are more urgent than The Toe,” he replied.
The Toe felt slighted.
Or when I wrecked my leg stupidly riding my son’s skateboard and was ignored in the ER for an hour until they realized The Skateboard wasn’t a 10-year-old kid, but me.
They stopped calling me The Skateboard. I became The Gomer, as in “Get out of my emergency room.”
I concluded such detachment must help them not take it personally should we, heaven forbid, expire in their care.
Back to the heart, an arrhythmia put me in the ER on a slow night when only about 300 people waited to see a doctor. The lofty designation as The Heart shot me up the triage list ahead of everyone except The Gunshot Wound to the Head.
It was so crowded they didn’t have a curtained stall for me, so they just stripped me, threw on a threadbare gown and left me on a gurney in the main room.
A dour ER doctor with rubber gloves appeared. He dipped his finger in lube, rolled me on my side and performed a thorough rectal exam, nodding as he departed to indicate I’d passed.
Thank goodness! My heart might not make it through the night, but my prostate was good for years to come.
A cardiologist arrived and checked my EKG as he slipped on a rubber glove, dipped his finger in jelly and rolled me on my side.
I struggled to remember the old saying about the fastest way to a man’s heart. I was pretty sure this wasn’t it.
I said, “Hey Doc, I’ve been accused of having my head up there, but never my heart.”
A young medical student came and patted my hand as she explained arrhythmias like mine were seldom serious.
She almost had me believing these people knew what they were doing until she donned a glove, lubed her finger and rolled me on my side.
I couldn’t understand why they kept having their way with me like that until I figured it out years later while awaiting the toe X-ray.
My ER problems started when the orderly asked where to put my gurney with no empty stalls and the head nurse said, “Park The A**hole over there.”
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
