I don’t like going to the doctor, but I dislike being sick even more so about once every other year I get an upper respiratory infection severe enough for me to make an appointment with Dr. Davis; I can count on him to gravely take my vital signs, listen to my lungs and send me home with a prescription; in a day or two I’m back to normal.
The idea of seeing a physician when I’m sick is so logical to me that I am mystified by people like my partner’s brother, Louis, who would prefer to stay sick indefinitely rather than schedule a visit to the family doctor. Complicating matters, Louis, a retired cop who lives in New Jersey with his 85-year old mother, is a hypochondriac who spends his days surfing the web looking for diseases to match his symptoms. This type of behavior rarely ends well because if you spend enough time searching on-line you can talk yourself into almost anything, and Louis does. This is how in the last three months Louis managed to diagnose himself with St. Vitas Dance, Scrofula and Dengue fever. He had scurvy for a day or two but thankfully Duckie, my partner’s no-nonsense mother, gave him a glass of orange juice and it went away.
Unfortunately, it has never occurred to Louis that it is possible to suffer in silence and after almost 60 years of very vocal suffering he gets no sympathy at all from either his mother or my partner, who simply ignores Louis’s phone calls and deletes his emails. Since no one else will listen to him, Louis emails me a long, rambling, grocery-list of his symptoms on a fairly regular basis, and asks what I think he should do. My response is always the same, “I think you should see a doctor.”
Louis’s response is always the same too: “I hate doctors. I’ll just let nature take its course.” This email pattern is so well-established that I rarely give it a second thought.
Then last week I got an email from Louis that made me sit up and take notice. “My symptoms are escalating,” he wrote. “I am very worried about who will take care of Mom when I am no longer here to do so.”
If it’s possible to sigh via email I did. “Is your ship sailing soon?” I wrote.
“I don’t want to burden you with my troubles,” he responded, “but my miseries are multiplying. Please do not share this with my brother,” he continued. “I don’t want him to worry and I know his plate is full.”
Subsequent emails revealed that Louis had diagnosed himself with some ghastly but non-specific gastrointestinal disease that is invariably fatal. His main symptom, to hear him tell it, was that he had not had a bowel movement since Halloween. I suggested he see a doctor.
“I hate doctors,” he said. “I’ll wait a couple more months and see what happens. No point rushing these things. Please don’t tell my mother or brother.”
“Louis thinks he’s dying,” I immediately told my partner as I simultaneously texted the news to Duckie, with news of his primary symptom. My partner was bored. “Tell him to take some castor oil,” he said, “that’s what Mom used to give us when we were kids. He’ll be back to normal in an hour.”
If it’s possible to sigh via text message Duckie did so now. “I’ll handle this,” she said, and that night she made Louis a huge dinner of Polish sausage that also featured cabbage, Brussels sprouts, baked beans and a large salad, with stewed prunes for dessert.
“My illness progresses rapidly,” Louis emailed me the next day. “I now have irritable bowel syndrome.”