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No politics today)
I call my doctor "Jerry"
By Barry Friedman
I call my doctor Jerry.
Always wanted to be on a first name basis with my doctor, always wanted a doctor who knew my name without first having to check the chart on the door before he walked in the room.
We had dinner the other night. How cool is that?
He paid. How cool is THAT?
Two diet cokes, I kept telling myself, just order two, and eat just one basket of bread. Don’t make him yell at you.
“This bad for you?” I ask.
“Diet Coke is really, really, really bad for you. Regular Cole is really, really, really, really bad.”
Four reallys to three reallys : Diet Coke is healthier.
A mystery of life unraveled.
Jerry doesn’t wear a white coat. Sometimes he wears lederhosen or dresses like a biker. He’s in his 70s, but touch his arms, they feel like steel. During my last exam, he was smoking an e-cigarette with special vitamins and minerals inside and bragged how his prostate was better than mine. He was wearing a derby. His wife came in at one point and brought him lunch in a plastic container.
He beamed when he saw her.
I sat, he sat, while a physicians assistant took notes on an iPad. She sat on the exam table. We were in chairs. Jerry’s head was always up, his eyes on me. Time spent with your doctor doesn’t count if he’s looking at a chart, scribbling notes. He felt my wrists, looked at my ear lobes, asked about my father. “Tell your father to move here and I’ll play pinochle with him.” I noticed in my file, amidst all the labs reports and prescriptions and echo-cardiograms was a copy of one of my Tulsa People columns.
“Huh?” I asked.
“I know about you.”
He asked the physicians’ assistant to leave.
“I’m going to talk to Barry for awhile.”
She left.
“So, how’s everything else going in your life? How’s your girlfriend?” he asked.
But what’s remarkable about this, about him, is that he does this with every patient. I’m not special. I heard him say to a woman once, “I swear to you. I will help you.” He was holding her hand when he said it and he was sitting with her … in the waiting room.
Another time he walked a woman arm and arm down the hall to get an ultrasound.
Another time he patted a man’s hand and told him what he was going to do at the next appointment.
Who does that in 2014? We have the best healthcare in the world, we keep hearing, but it’s parceled out in quarter hour segments. I’ve waited over an hour to see Jerry, but our kibitzing takes longer than fifteen minutes.
Jerry is not a healthcare provider, not a primary care physician.
He’s a doctor.
He hates the Affordable Care Act; he hated the old system.
Patients he loves, even the poor ones.
He once said to me, “Your insurance is terrible, they won’t pay for this, so let’s do the next best thing.”
Maybe there’s your healthcare reform right there. Doctors who become doctors for the same reason painters become painters and landscapers become landscapers and yoga instructors become yoga instructors. Not to get rich, not to incorporate, but because they love the craft.
Oversimplified? Probably, but when you go to a doctor, you want it simple, you want human contact, to feel you’re not just a cyst, a biopsy, a colonoscopy. First time I saw, I was told it would be a three-hour exam. I don’t think I’ve spent three hours with all the doctors I’ve ever seen in my entire life combined.
And, most important, things no doctor ever told me was wrong with me, I no longer suffer from.
My body, apparently, refuses to metabolize folic acid—lazy bastard. Anyway, we’ve tricked it.
I’ve heard him tell patients to dance more.
I have his cellphone number and we’ve been out for bagels.
Fifty years ago, he would have had a black bag and sat on the edge of my bed and given me a sucker.
The new face of healthcare may be the old one.
One more thing: On the way out, after my initial visit, one of the women at the front desk asked if I was happy with everything.
“Very much,” I said. “I can’t believe it. He held my hand.”
“That means he likes you.”