My Awful Doctor Visit Experience

It couldn't have happened at a worse time. My regular doctor was out of town. I was having abdominal pains that ibuprofen would not whisk away. A friend talked me into visiting a doctor she'd worked with years earlier. She highly recommended him as one who really cared about his patients. So I made an appointment for the next day and went to see this wonderful doctor.

When I got there and filled out the required paperwork, the nurse escorted me to the back where she took my weight and blood pressure. Let me add that at the time, I weighed 147 pounds. This little will become even more important in a minute. The nurse informed me that my blood pressure was very high. At the time, I didn't have sense enough to be concerned about my blood pressure numbers. I just chuckled and told her that I was probably nervous about seeing the doctor. Plus, all this pain in my stomach probably drove it up.

The nurse told me to undress and put on the gown before she left the room. The minutes went by. A half hour went by. In a distant room, I could hear a man talking to another man. I was hurting so bad and wanting the doctor to come and examine me so bad that I didn't tune in. Then the voice I'd heard behind some closed door became clearer, like whoever he was had stepped into the hall. He was the doctor, and he talked very loud. His conversation went like this. . .

"Exactly, that's the problem with people around here. They're all overweight, and they have high blood pressure, and they eat all this food that's not good for them. I sat in a restaurant the other day and watched the girl make tea. She poured a five pound bag of sugar in a canister of tea! That's a recipe for diabetes! No wonder people around here are sick. It's ridiculous how much food they eat. No matter how much I try to warn them about the effects of obesity, and eating fatty foods. It goes in one ear and out the other. What am I supposed to do? If they want to kill themselves, let them kill themselves..."

This tirade listing all the things we were doing wrong and eating wrong went on for another hour, it seemed. The more I heard, the worse my abdominal cramps got. By the time he came into the room where I was waiting, I was already ready to go. All that he just said didn't sound like he cared about patients to me.

The doctor walked in, looking at my chart the whole time, never making eye contact with me. He introduced himself, and instead of asking me what the problem was today, he told me that I had high blood pressure and I was overweight. Everything he said in the hall - guess what? I had to listen to it again. My stomach is cramping me into knots, and my temper is pretty near the boiling point.

First of all, since he never looked up at me, he couldn't see that I did not have a weight problem. Secondly, if my blood pressure was high, it was due to his awful bedside manner. When he finally looked at me, he paused momentarily and recanted about the weight. But, I still needed to be treated for hypertension. As he wrote out a prescription for blood pressure meds, I decided we would never see each other again. There he was scheduling a new appointment for me to see him.

I was so angry when I left his office, all my abdominal pain was gone. My doctor was back the next week: I was so glad.

Let me say that the doctor was right and I was wrong about my blood pressure. It was years later that I got medical attention for that. He was right about the southern food culture, too. In many cases the more sugar and fat in our recipes, the better the dishes tastes. At the time I went to him, I had restricted sweets and fried foods. They were not a part of my diet at all. But because my blood pressure was at the stroking point, he stereotyped me as being an obese, unhealthy eater.

It was not long afterwards that he moved out of the area. My thoughts on that? Good riddance!