Doctors

What’s crazy for so many of us is how difficult this time is now.

Getting even older (!!) and dealing with these large and impossible problems every

single day (the list is infinite) is even harder than the pandemic, which now seems like

Big Break from Life. And then there is The Doctor Problem.

I grew up with a doctor uncle who took good care of us.

The care was simpler then. We lived in a small town. There wasn’t much waiting for

anything. (Robitussin was what he often prescribed.)

Appointments were easy. And so were my problems.

When I moved to New York City in the 70’s, I never thought

about doctors. In the eighties we met a doctor couple who

became our good friends and our good doctors for many years.

We all met socially, and immediately got along. Funny and

intelligent, they both taught at a major New York City hospital,

and shared a private practice together. They specialized in solving

medical mysteries. Patients came from all over the world. They

would cure them. And then, in one of those odd and ironic medical mysteries that no

one seemed able to solve, she got sick and they traveled to doctors

who couldn’t help her. They both quit being doctors. He cared for her

full-time and they turned over their patients to a man who didn’t take

our insurance. Because we’re older, the doctor question became more serious now.

I asked everyone I knew, and even some random strangers, what they thought about

their doctors. Most people were ambivalent.

Peter solved this problem by joining One Medical, a Silicon Valley 24/7 medical system

that took all insurance, and charges a $100 fee. (Unfortunately it’s owned by

by Amazon now. CVS has doctors too specializing in gerontology,)

I went to see what One Medical was like. It seemed to me like an Apple formula

for the body. I wanted something I was more used to:

a schmoozer who took care of me.

Then I read Atul Gawande’s On Being Mortal, a fantastic book about aging,

medicine and quality of life. I wanted a doctor who’d read

Gawande, and walked around the neighborhood visiting possible

candidates. One day I saw an Indian man who loved Gawande.

I asked why he became a doctor, and this is the story he told.

Both his parents were physicians. So were his brothers. He

didn’t think he should be a doctor too so he went to MIT and

stayed until he got his PhD. At his exit interview, his advisor

asked what he wanted to do next. “Although I don’t believe in

Freud or the unconscious,” he told me, “still I said I want to be

a doctor.” Even he was surprised at that. So he went to Johns

Hopkins and became an internist. I saw him for a few years.

He was an odd person, and applied mathematical skills

to medical probabilities telling me the likelihood

of my getting this or that. Visiting him seemed a

little like participating in a science experiment. But he was in

the neighborhood, and I didn’t need much.

All of a sudden he left. His office wouldn’t say where

he went. (I secretly hoped he’d chosen a third career.)

By then I was even older so I thought I had to be a little more

serious about the process. Concierge medicine had come into

its own and some of my friends were paying money for the

luxury of medical access.

One way I’m trying to evolve as a person (with only occasional

success) is not to judge every single thing such as concierge

medicine, which seems just wrong. Still I understand that we

all need more help now, and having a doctor an email away

could be an appealing option. But I wasn’t ready for that.

For years I’ve been posting a poem a day online. I asked my

readers if anyone loved their doctor. Eight people sent me

names and numbers. I decided I’d visit four.

I was still looking for Atul Gawande, my uncle, and preferably,

a female physician.

The first three were OK enough and I know that OK enough is

an acceptable category but still I was hoping for more. A

talented artist who reads the poems told me about her favorite

doctor and she was the last person I saw. Marilyn Jackson with

NYU and an office on the West Side. Not a requirement but

still. I tried not to be overly hopeful when I visited her office.

Just a small funky place with one assistant and the doctor.

No impossible switchboards (Mt. Sinai and Columbia

Presbyterian being the two absolute worst.) She walked

out to say hello and even shook my hand. Her inside office

was funky too. She did not stare at her computer as though

it had Significant Insights. She took my blood tests

from my endocrinologist, who does so many I don’t need more.

And then she said just that. (The other three suggested I

be tested again. Who knows why.) She examined me with her

hands. She schmoozed and liked Atul Gawande. We agreed

that she’d be my doctor. “I’ll even call you back,” she said.

So far that’s been true.

Join us for an Alte gathering on Monday. Drinks snacks and a fantastic play excerpt by Judy Rabinor.

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Although it wasn’t a requirement, my new doctor likes this song.