I was without inspiration for a post today and had thought not to bother, but then I visited Footsie’s fabulous site (http://fishwhackerswindle.blogspot.com/) and rediscovered that inspiration is often only a click away in this fabulous, electronic New Age.

He is a doctor, although he won’t reveal what or whom he doctors, or even if he deals with his patients, pre-death. His post is an excellent inside-look at the characteristics of the distinct doctor-types and how they relate to one another.

Rather than leave an enormous comment over at Foot Eater’s, I thought I’d turn it into a post, but I owe the prompt entirely to him. Thank-you Mr. Eater. He arranged his descriptions of the doctors in the same way I have, except his are well-informed, pithy opinions and mine are merely flubbery impressions and reminiscences. Here they are then:

Note: If the post appears more commenty than posty, it’s because it was born of a comment and still bears a comment-birth-mark. I’m too tired to change it much and, indeed, may never do so.

Surgeons: Bah! Load of overpaid plumbers, if you ask me.

Physicians: I like the old-fashioned country ones with glasses, tweed suits and balding heads, particularly if those also happen to be men. Bald-headed, tweedy, myopic lady-doctors should be sent to heal the Welsh, and the Welsh alone. I also like the unshaven, grim-jawed ones. Especially if they have manly strides. It’s important that these sorts of doctor be male too, if they are to star in any gripping medical drama this housewife would care to watch.

And also, they shouldn’t be Flemmish (I can’t stand the hacking coughs of the Flemmish. Is it any wonder superbugs are on the rise? The rise in superbugs and the Belgian medical boom are directly proportional one to the other, trust me, (I’m not a doctor). These filthy Belgians don’t even cover their mouths or wash their hands after expectorating. Or shave their armpits. Or floss regularly. Beasts! Oy Belgium! Stick to chocolates!

Female doctors are, of course, every bit as capable but have colder hands than male doctors and as a child, if I’m honest, I preferred male doctors because I used to worry about germs collecting betwixt the precious stones on the female doctors’ engagement-rings.

Paediatricians: We never had them in Lewis when I was wee and we still don’t as far as I know. We had The Doctor and that was it. Our GP was Dr. Neil. We didn’t even get a goldfish to look at in his waiting-room, far less developmental toys and Legos. Our mothers were all terrified we’d put small toys in our ears, back then in the 70s. That was the major parenting worry, not whether your child would be able to identify Mozart in “The Great Composers Flashcard Series For The Under 5s” or not. If some child had put a Dr Neil Lego-brick in his or her ears, there would have been hell on in The Outer Hebrides. Dr. Neil would have had to hand in his stethoscope and move to Ullapool in shame.

By the 80s in the Hebrides, the big fear was things up noses (perhaps it was something to to do with Adrian Mole). Mind you in an interesting interlude in primary school, circa early 80s, Lewis, we had a whole bunch of urban, suburban, not-urban-in-any-way myths involving the ‘bad-boys’ at school and their horribly fascinating bad-boy accidents.

One boy in my class apparantly chewed his lip off after the dentist numbed it despite the rest of us never ever noticing, and another one had a football-sized lump of accumulated chewing-gum removed from his stomach. It’s true! I heard it from Wee Iain whose second cousin’s cousin-on-the-other-side was in hospital having her tonsils out when he/they were brought in bleeding/vomiting.

Now, as I raise my own children, it’s windpipes. I’ve had more than one early-morning purge of chokable objects in the house following eye-popping nightmares of ineffectual Heimlich Maneuvers.

Objects in orifices seems to be a very dating thing when it comes up in conversation. Just as being called Mildred or Vera marks you out as a child of early last century, whatever orifice in which your mother was scared you’d put a miniature soldier or bead, will tell the world (or maybe just the Hebrides, I dunno) in which decade you spent your single digits.

(As a wee digression, you can also learn to get quite good at locating and dating a person’s childhood by asking them where their parents told them the children were starving when they wouldn’t eat their tomatoes. I sent pocket-money and pleaded to send my tomatoes to Africa. Dave was told to eat up because they were starving in India. One of my friends is from Orange County and he maintains that at same time Dave was feeling guilty about empty-bellied little Indian children and his uneaten peas, he should really have been more worried about the empty-bellied little Chinese children. Of course, a better way to determine their time and date of childhood is to ask them, but that’s not as fun. When my elderly auntie-in-law was a child they were still, apparantly, starving in Europe.)

Anaesthetists: Aren’t they just semi-professional golfers with big needles? I can’t recall too many of them, which probably means they were all doing their jobs well, but when I had the girls (twins) I had to have a C-Section and therefore an epidural. The anesthesiologists as they are called here, ( In America “haemoglobin” has too many letters but “anaesthetist” doesn’t have enough, apparantly. It’s one of their Ways) gave me my epidural and the doctor was hovering over my tummy with her scalpel twinkling malevolantly, all a-ready to go in, when I realised that I could still wiggle my toes. I alerted the medical personnel present and, as luck would have it, almost everybody there was a medical person.

“OK”, said the anasthesio… God, I feel like a nap and a cuppa half-way through that word…

“OK”, said the numbing doctor. He gave me more anaesthetic (which is the opposite of “aesthetic” and can’t get a date because of that, despite his fine personality and the ability to soothe away all pains). But still my toes wiggled.

“I’ve given you enough to numb 2 women!” he exclaimed, but gave me some more anyway ‘cos my toes were very clearly still wiggling at my command. I’m 5′8″ and 115lbs so I can only assume it was all going to the babies. They must have been having a real giggle in there. They were certainly pretty dopey when they came out.

Psychiatrists: Least said.

Radiologists: I’d broken 4 bones in separate accidents in the first 21 years of my life: a leg, an arm, a finger and a toe, and the radiologists were always pretty nice when they were adjusting my broken limbs into painful positions for the X-rays. It seems like an unforgiveable thing to do, to manipulate another human being’s cracked skeleton and torn nerves, but I’ve never met one that didn’t do it with a cheerful smile and a merry whistle.

Obstetricians/Gyneacologists: – even though intellectualy I know it should make no difference, I still prefer a lady gyneacologist:

At university, I was in the same Halls of Residence as One Of The Creepiest Guys I have Ever Known. He wanted to be a gyneacologist. My friend and I were having a tea-break in his room once, during a collective all-night study panic in the library, where we’d met him. It was to be our first and last visit.

The first things we noticed were all the pictures of tigers on his wall and then, how psychotically neat everything was. He’d lined up all his 1ps on the desk in a row beside equally neat rows of 2ps and 5ps. Nothing too unusual there, you say -just a neat bloke with a tiger thing – why so hard on him Sam? Because:

He made me go and stand in what he’d figured out to be the draughtiest part of his room which, he told us, was not where he’d expected it would be before he’d started his calculations. When I moved away from from the spot, (which was indeed a chilly one) he grinned horribly and told us he wanted to be a gyneacologist, hehehe. Then he asked if we wanted to see his knife collection. (!) We moved to leave and he got visibly irked by that. Then he told us how intelligent he was and how very, very neat. We could see one of those traits was true enough but knew the other wasn’t completely true because he’d had his Kreb’s cycle all wrong the library when we were testing each other earlier, and had loudly decried my version as a heresy! An imposter! A false Kreb’s cycle. Only he, he knew the TRUE Cycle of Kreb’s, textbooks be damned!

Where he might have had smarts enough to be a doctor, he had neither the emotional nor personal skills and, irrationally enough, put me off the whole idea of male gyneacologists. I don’t know what happened to him, but I pray to God he’s in the Bar L (notorious Barlinnie prison in Scotland) and safely away from the general public.

General Practitioners: The foot-soldiers on the front-lines the doctoring profession; ironically, also the most well-remunerated and well-rested of medicine’s soldiers, hammering away at all Little Colin’s sniffles and Mrs. MacAuley’s ,varicose veins, to create a brighter, healthier tomorrow for all of us. Really though, I think they’re worth they’re weight in Gold Bond ointment. Who on earth wants to sit and listen to people describe symptoms as specifically vaguely as we’re all wont to do?

Patient: “It feels like I’ve eaten a cat-fish with hot sauce and a side of rancid coleslaw”

Doctor: “Well have you?”

Patient: “Why yes, I have! Last night, with some vodka and an individual-size brie . Dr. you’re a bloomin’ marvel! Thanks ever so! I’m going to tell all my friends to come and see you).

Plus, if there’s a deadly disease on the go, GPs are far more likely to catch it before the rest of us.

Pathologists: Happily, I’ve never needed one, but I refer you back to Mr. Eater. for the truth about these “whey-faced denizens of the crypt”. (http://fishwhackerswindle.blogspot.com/)

Happy Easter!

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