The ups and downs of being a doc

Life and a road trip recently took me through Rawlins, Wyoming. Hours of driving through the monotony of southwest Wyoming dictated the need for a pit stop; time to eat and rest glare-weary eyes.

We found a little restaurant, actually the only diner on Main St. that teemed with life and advertised breakfast served all day. Several stuffed animals graced the entryway, real stuffed animals including a bobcat caught for all eternity mid-leap as he brought down a fleeing pheasant. The women's room sported, of course, the title 'Cowbelles' and the men's merely 'Cowboys.'

The meal was so-so, they were out of blueberry muffins and I passed on the alternative biscuits and gravy. As we finished our meal, a tall and sunburned man strode by, balding head shaved close, a slight potbelly protruding over his turquoise studded belt buckle and a beeper hanging off the belt. Most heads turned as he passed, a wide variety of townfolk waved and called "Hi Doc."

Ah, a diner in a town where everybody knows your name. I longed to jump up too and yell "I'm a Doc" and have them all laugh with delight that this dusty aging hippie in coffee-spotted capris and a t-shirt was a colleague to their own dear Doc.

Anyway, Doc Rawlins got to the counter to pay his bill, and I waited to see if they would offer him a bag of blueberry muffins to add to the bag already on his waistline. But instead, the older woman at the register started in on a long story about her bowels and her trip to the regional hospital. Not that I was eavesdropping, but shoot, we were sitting nearby, and I was hoping, at least, for some wonderful tale about how the Doc had saved her aging aunt.

Then I remembered that I live in a neighborhood and shop at a grocery store where many know my name. Why one patient one day described her vaginal woes to me in produce, and another pulled down her lower eyelid in paper goods to ask me whether or not her bloodshot, oozing eye was conjunctivitis. It was. I called in a prescription right then and there to the pharmacy located just east of aisle 18.

On my second day back to work after our Wyoming tour, the nurse practitioner asked me to look at a cat bite, or rather a young woman's hand with four cat bites on it one of which had penetrated her thumbnail. In the day since the feline's attack, the hand had swelled some, the thumb turning pink and puffy. Cat bites are nasty affairs; think for a moment what sorts of fishy things go in that mouth. I told the NP to call a hand surgeon and confirm that oral antibiotics would suffice for a now.

Several minutes later, she returned, sadly shaking her head. "No go, Chief," she reported, "I couldn't get past the front desk with my question. They offered me an appointment for next Tuesday."

What sort of nonsense was that? I strode to the phone and pulled the officious "This is Dr. P, I need to talk to your on-call physician now about a patient."

"Just a moment, I'll get Dr. W," the receptionist said. A moment later she returned to ask "Would this be about a cat bite perhaps? We just had a patient call here for advice a moment ago."

The hand surgeon came on the line shortly thereafter and confirmed the NP's plan as a good one. I realized then, once again, the value of the title and the ease with which it takes me right to the top. Maybe someday it will get me blueberry muffins as well.