pleurisy

You mark my words: the time will come when doctors will be little more than glorified computer technicians.

It's two a.m. and my pleurisy is keeping me awake. Pleurisy is a viral-based inflammation in the pleural cavity - the lining between the lungs and the inside of the ribcage. It hurts like a motherfool and there's nothing you can do about it but tape a pillow to your chest, take anti-inflammatories, and curse yourself for having to breathe to stay alive. I just wasted two and a half hourse down at the hospital so a doctor could tell me that. That, and oh yeah, "it's going to get worse before it gets better".

I call it a waste because I already knew this. I knew I had pleurisy.

How? Well, first I paid attention to my inner kinesthetic sense and identified the source of the pain as my pleura using some basic anatomical knowledge gleaned from that industrial first aid course I took last year. Then I googled it along with some key terms about my symptoms, and presto, magnifico - pleurisy! There was my diagnosis, symptoms, and treatment in five pages of text.

I printed it out and, because the pain was keeping me up and I had nothing better to do, I hopped in my car and went down to emergency at the hospital six minutes from my house. Socialized medicine in Canada means that hospital waiting rooms are a cheap source of entertainment when it feels like every time you take a breath you're getting punched, hard, in the ribs. It's free, once you pay your premiums, and you get to hang out with a bunch of people worse off than you. There really is something great about the humanity of a hospital waiting room. Like Lawrence, who doesn't recognize his name when the nurse calls it because "everbody calls me Larry". Or the octogenarian dozing contentedly while his wife pinches a bloody nose. Or the nifty magazines.

I thought about showing the triage nurse my five pages of pleurisy, but when I ignored her first misguided question and started to fill her in on the pertinent details she gave a little snort and a half-disguised eye roll - the kind of eye roll that says, "here we go again, another Dr. Amateur Knowitall". I stopped, dropped it, ignored her roll and answered her blunt-trauma questions.

Then I waited.

I know I said before that I hate waiting, but it's not so bad when I'm doing it for, you know, spit and giggles. Eventually a nice-looking nurse took down my important details - like who to call when my spleen ruptures - and I was told to sit down and wait some more. I waited. Eventually, I was ushered into a curtained cubicle, where I waited some more.

An officious nurse in her early fifties came in, poked and prodded me, asked some questions, hmmed about my symptoms, then left. I waited some more. She came back and gave me a hospital gown to put on. For a second, I thought maybe my little medical adventure was about to include some sweet-action public nudity, but she said I could keep my pants on. Then she closed the curtain and left (for policy's sake or my squeamishness, I don't know) and I put the thing on.

I put it on backwards - with the open part facing forward - because it looked better, because she didn't tell me which way to put in on, and because I figured her reaction when she came back in would be worth an inward chuckle. I waited some more. She came back in, started, apologized for not telling me which way to put it on, and left again for a long time while I switched it. Sure enough, I chuckled.

When she came back, she had a stethescope. I love stethescopes - they're little round cold magic portals into the mysteries of your guts. She stethescoped me, asked a few more questions, and left. I picked up a copy of The Economist and learned how the oppressed asians are dodging The Great Firewall of China through the use of proxy web browsers, how a dutch guy made solar power a viable option, and how cell phones might one day be implanted in your brain. Fascinating stuff. Worth the trip.

After all that, a doctor in green scrubs came in and repeated the litany I'd been through twice already. She prodded me all over, made me take a bunch of excruciatingly deep breaths, and left. I waited some more. She came back and sent me down the long hallway to the Xray room. There are probably few things as creepy as a dimly lit, empty hospital hallway after hours, but I managed to suppress the temptation to let out a bloodcurdling scream. The Xray bit was fun, too, except for the whole part about liquifying my organs with radiation.

I waited some more, then the Xray technician sent me back to my cubicle.

Where I waited a lot more. I read about Burgundy wines in National Geographic, how the U.S. can't keep on occupying Iraq in Newsweek, and about the plight of black people during the fifties in the literature anthalogy I'd brought along for good measure.

The doctor, at long last, came in. "You have a condition called pleurisy", she said, and then proceeded to repeat to me the information I had read at home two and a half hours before. I nodded and tried to look like an enthralled recipient of medical wisdom from on high. Then I thanked her and her fellow preistesses of the great Rx, said goodbye to my cursing, whining, puking, bleeding fellowsufferers, hopped into my car and drove home in the freshfound knowledge that I had pleurisy.

That's why I figure in the future it is all going to be done by computers, which are going to come with little medical-testing apparatii, like disposable pinprickers that scan your blood and tell you the exact day and time when you contracted the disease that will most likely kick your bucket.

So if I knew all about what I had ahead of time, why did I go to the hospital? Was it just to waste my tax dollars and snork, nose held high, at the inefficiency of socialized medicine? Maybe. Or maybe I was unwilling to proceed without being assured by a professional that I wasn't fatally hemorraging and apt to die from a tension pneumothorax.

Most likely, though, it just felt good to be reassured after two point five hours of my precious, pain-wracked time that I was, in fact, worthy of the title of Dr. Amateur Knowitall.