Open Writing

The doctor who delivered me at birth was named, no joking, Dr. Wrench. As far as I know, it was not a difficult birth for either me or my mother, so wrenching was not required, but we were in good hands just the same. Attending to my mother’s pregnancy and confinement was the first of many services Dr. Wrench rendered our family. The relationship continued for the next thirty years until he took a well deserved retirement.

During that time, Dr. Wrench probably visited our house over a hundred times. He later delivered my sister, and responded uncritically to the hypochondria of my father and my father’s mother. He prescribed for all the classic childhood ailments my sister and I sustained, and for a few that were out of the mainstream. These included a serious eye infection that almost cost me the sight of one eye, scarlet fever, and a broken arm and leg, plus a few mysterious ailments generally referred to as “growing pains.”

I never minded a visit to his surgery. There were the tantalizingly mysterious smells emanating from his pharmacy, and copies of the glossy society magazine, the London Illustrated News, to read, from which I derived ideas above my station. By the time I was 8 years old I knew all about the polo crowd, and what an Aston Martin or Bentley sports car looked like, and how to dress for the Ascot races.

Eavesdropping on whispered conversations between patients packed into the small, always full waiting room, also provided a distraction. Since his surgery was also his home, there were, in addition, the intriguingly faint snatches of conversation from his household, heard through the connecting door in the waiting room.

Dr. Wrench invariably greeted each patient personally at the door as they entered his office. This provided another source of fascination for me through the few words he exchanged with them before his office door closed as they entered, and as his parting shot when they were leaving. It was like connecting the dots in order to get a picture of why the patient was visiting.

Once seated before him at his large, carved desk, he would listen attentively while my mother described my symptoms. Meanwhile, I would scan the blue and brown bottles on the pharmacy shelves behind him, wondering which of their contents were providing the aroma I was so taken with. Probably a combination of morphine, peppermint, ipepechuana, syrup of squills and paregoric, or medicines I knew not the what of.

I also often wondered with some trepidation what was in the bottles with the scull and crossbones label, marked “Poison.” Why would poisons be used to make sick people well I wondered? Dr. Wrench almost always made up the medicine he prescribed while one waited. Rarely did he write a prescription until the latter years of his practice, when the flood of, so called, wonder drugs was beginning. Powders were ground with a pestle and mortar and weighed on a scale. Liquids were measured in a tall, graduated flask, held up to the light.

By contrast, my current physician is a Dr. Nagraj, one of three Doctors Nagraj in my town. He is from Pakistan, via Afghanistan, and is the sixth family doctor I have had in the past forty years. Visits to Dr. Nagraj are not pleasant. He is a nice man, and I think a competent doctor within his specialty, but like most family physicians today, he knows little of his patients.

When visiting his office, one is met by a nurse who proceeds to check one’s blood pressure, temperature and weight, irrespective of the reason for the visit. One is then left perched on a paper covered examination couch just high enough that one’s feet don’t reach the floor. There is nothing to do but stare at the posters advertising the latest wonder drug, or the dangers of indiscriminate sex.

There are no windows in the room, the air conditioning is set at sub-freezing and the fluorescent lighting reveals every skin blemish. The only overheard conversations are those between the Dr. and the patient in the adjacent consulting room, or loud exchanges between his administrative staff about medical insurance problems. Because I don’t like to visit Dr. Nagraj, my blood pressure is always a little elevated, so I know my first contest will be resisting his insistence on medicating me for it.

He doesn’t know me well, or my family’s health history, therefore he attempts to supplement his ignorance with batteries of tests, whether one has symptoms or not. So I know my second battle is going to be refusing the tests he prescribes. My only medical problem is that I’m a healthy person from a healthy family, thanks to good genes and Dr. Wrench, but there is no way to convince Dr. Nagraj of that.

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