Paging Dr. Herman, Dr. Peewee Herman

Today is June 17th, 2011 and thus far marks the 7th month to the day that I have had the misfortune of dealing with my current medical condition (a stage 4 decubitus ulcer, one of the wonderful things being in a wheelchair has to offer). So, what have I learned over these 7 months? Not a whole hell of a lot that I didn’t know before. What I HAVE learned is that doctors are not the gods they pretend to be. I’ve learned that even with the MD, doctors are just like you and me. I’ve learned that rhyming is far to easy. I’ve also learned that despite what the television try’s to make me believe, wounds and ailments are not so effortlessly healed. And lastly I’ve learned that the sense of urgency that most of us feel, is absent in these so-called miracle workers of the medical industry.

You’re probably asking yourself “what the hell is this fool yammering about” and so I’ll tell you.

Imagine if you will, a sunny meadow with fluffy bunnies leaping through the grasses with effortless joy. A deer grazes calmly in the distance and a monster truck sits idly on a hilltop, engines revving, fire-spitting out its pipes like a dragons fevered breath…and now forget all that because I just wanted to see how well you were paying attention. Now imagine you have a small cut that gets infected. Doctors want to perform surgery to remove the infected tissue. Then for 7 months your told that you can’t put any pressure on that wound which means you have to spend an entire month immobile in a dirty and dilapidated Jacobs Ladder type hospital, then an additional 6 months and counting lying in bed at home staring at the same 4 walls day in and day out. That’s 7, count em, 7 friggin months! Can you imagine spending 7 months, laying on your side in one room? If you can grasp the magnitude of that, you can understand how much it sucks. That’s seven months of not going out of the house. Seven months of not going to see movies, going out to dinner, over to friends houses or even something as basic as going to the grocery store. Seven Friggin Months!

Now I’m not one to complain about medical problems even though I’ve been in this chair for 23 years. If you were to ask my family or friends, they’d tell you I never even talk about it. But now I feel this need. Just last week my oh so brilliant doctor told me to my face that there is no rush. I was dumfounded. No rush? It’s been seven goddamn months I told him, so yeah there is a rush, specifically rush of anger swelling up inside me ready to crack this assholes skull…but I digress. Like I said I don’t like to talk about medical problems because to me it’s personal and if you know me, I’m a fairly private guy but I had to complain about this.

What’s the point of this blog post? Simply that doctors…for a lack of a better word, suck. They know what they know and they don’t want to know anything else because it might devalue the years of schooling they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for. And they don’t like when the patient is more educated on the specifics of the issue being dealt with than they are.

Lastly, it just seems that in this age of hand transplants, bionic prosthetics, heart surgeries and plastic surgeries, that these doctors, if they really wanted to, could heal something as simple as a cut or scrape. But they can’t. I know from logic, and experience that if I cut my finger, there is a 100% chance of a 100% recovery. I know from science, that our bodies have evolved from the beginning to generate new cells to replace damaged or dead ones. Yet with all that basic knowledge, a doctor has the audacity to tell me, I may never ever heal and that there is the possibility that I have to spend the rest of my life lying in bed, unable to enjoy something as simple as a sunny day. And to that I say, SUCK IT DOCTORS!

I now return you to your regularly scheduled program.