Текст книги "Dude, Where's my Stethoscope?"
Автор книги: Donovan Gray
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 14 страниц)
I snuck a look at the person in the vehicle in front of me and recognized her to be Mrs. Hatter, a tenuously-controlled schizophrenic. As usual, she was busy taking enormous drags from one of her supersized homemade cigarettes.
“Welcome to Tim Hortons! Can I take your order please?”
Mrs. Hatter looked straight up at the sky for a few seconds. She then cocked her head to the side like a pigeon and scanned the horizon in all directions. When she was satisfied all sectors were clear she resumed puffing.
“Uh, welcome to Tim Hortons… . Can I take your order please?”
She did her sky inspection once again. This time she also checked the glove compartment, her purse and the back seat. She then stubbed out her cigarette and lit a new one.
My stomach grumbled loudly. I debated whether or not I should walk over to her and explain that this particular voice happened to be coming from the drive-through microphone. I ended up deciding to wait one more minute and hope she figured it out on her own. Are you there, God? It’s me, Donny. Help her figure it out, okay? And while you’re at it, would you mind encouraging her to order just a coffee? Much obliged.
“Hello? Anyone there? Would you like to place an order?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna take der chili deal an’ a big coffee. An’ maybe a couple of dem donuts. Hey, youse guys got any sandwiches? What kinda soups you sell ’ere, anyways? Anyting on special today? How much you tink dis is gonna cost?”
I burnt rubber out of the parking lot.
Status Interrupticus
Mr. Golding is a 50-year-old man with a strong family history of heart disease. His cholesterol is astronomical and dietary adjustments have failed miserably. I’ve called him in to get him started on a cholesterol-lowering medication.
“Hey doc!”
“Hi Mr. Golding.”
“I guess my cholesterol’s still pretty high, eh?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“How high was it?”
“It was – ”
“I just can’t figure out why it won’t come down, doc! For breakfast every morning I eat a small bowl of Corn Flakes with skimmed milk. After that I have an apple or an orange, or sometimes I’ll take a glass of juice instead.”
“That’s good – ”
“Real juice, mind you, not fake junk like Tang. I can’t believe astronauts used to drink that stuff!”
“Can’t say I’ve ever – ”
“If I’m still hungry, I’ll have toast with margarine. Is that Becel stuff any good?”
“What?”
“According to the ads on TV, it’s really low in fat or something.”
“Most dieticians say – ”
“For lunch the wife fixes me a tuna sandwich. I must have told her a million times to go easy on the mayo, but she still slathers it on like crazy! Hey, doc, do you think she’s trying to kill me? Har-har!”
“Let’s hope not. Anyway, your cholesterol’s still quite high, so – ”
“Oh, and supper! What we eat depends on what day of the week it is. Usually Monday’s spaghetti night, but sometimes we have… doc? Where are you going? Doc?”
The Call of the Wild (Sorry, Jack!)
Last September I went on a canoe trip with four colleagues. I’m not much of a voyageur, but I figure if you live in northern Ontario you may as well get out and enjoy the great outdoors once in a while. Sometimes the wild north gets a little too wild, though… .
It was close to 4:00 on a chilly Wednesday afternoon by the time we finished cramming our supplies into the back of the truck. The drive from our town to Missinaibi Provincial Park was upwards of 400 kilometres, the last one-fifth of which involved slaloming down an unbelievably bumpy logging road.
When we were about 30 minutes from our destination a host of ominous-looking black clouds began boiling across the sky. By the time we arrived at the main entrance to the park it was raining torrentially. We’re talking biblical here. Noah. The floating zoo. A Farewell to Unicorns. You get the picture. We scoured the grounds for a vacant campsite. At last we found a cramped spot with a multitude of rocks and tree roots protruding through the grass. Welcome to Trump Towers! We pitched our tents in the pouring rain, ate a cold supper and crawled into our sleeping bags. As I prepared to enter the Dreaming I tried not to think about the warm bed I had left behind.
The next morning was cool and overcast, but at least it wasn’t raining. We broke camp and trooped down to the dock. The lake was steel grey. The small cove the dock jutted into was calm, but the rest of the lake looked choppy. As we loaded our provisions into the two canoes, a gnarled old Grizzly Adams look-alike hobbled over.
“Goin’ out on the lake?” he queried.
“Yes, we have a four-day trip planned,” I replied. “Can’t wait to get started!”
“Dern cold out.”
“You’re right, it is a bit nippy.”
“Ah’ve been out here more’n 25 years, an’ you wouldn’t catch me goin’ out on a mornin’ like this!”
“Oh. Well, according to the Weather Network – ”
He pointed at the kayak I had borrowed for the trip.
“Which one of yehs planning on using that contraption?”
“I am. As a matter of fact, this will be my first trip in a kayak!” I declared proudly.
For a moment his rheumy eyes widened in disbelief. He then snorted derisively and stumped away. I could have sworn I heard him mutter something about “dern city fools” under his breath.
While the canoes launched I zipped up my water-resistant windbreaker, secured my life jacket and pushed the kayak into the lake. Although it was light and handled easily, I found it hard to keep up with the canoes. After several minutes of paddling we got out of the cove and into the main body of the lake. Out there the winds were much stronger and the water was rough. Our progress slowed to a crawl. I conjured up a mental image of our trip map. We had to paddle approximately half the length of the lake before we got to the origin of the Missinaibi River. At our current pace, that was going to take four or five hours. If we hugged the shoreline there would be much less wind to contend with, but we’d be adding a lot of extra mileage to the trip. I had no idea how to do that clever barrel-roll manoeuvre that allows you to remain seated and flip a capsized kayak right-side up, so if I ended up in the drink I’d have to swim for dry land. I was therefore hoping the canoeists would stick close to shore. Instead, they chose the low-mileage option and headed straight for the centre of the lake.
Kayak paddles have a nasty tendency to dribble water onto you with each stroke, so by the end of the first hour I was soaked. By the end of the second hour the canoes were two tiny dots bobbing on the horizon and I was starting to wonder what the hell I was doing out in the middle of a freezing-cold lake in a kayak. Right about then I mistimed one of my strokes and plunged the paddle deep into a trough instead of a crest. This brought my centre of gravity way outside the kayak, which caused it to tilt nearly 90 degrees sideways. I spent the next two or three eternities staring down into the churning water and wishing I owned a caul as my vessel teetered on the verge of rolling over. It then made a loud grinding noise and shuddered back to its normal axis. After that I quit daydreaming.
An hour later we stopped at an island to rest. I was completely drenched. While I wrung out my clothes and poured lake water out of my ducky boots, my friend Will passed some mugs of soup around.
“Th-th-th-thanks!” I stammered. My teeth were chattering so badly it’s a wonder I didn’t bite my tongue off. The soup was piping hot and it warmed us up quickly. Before long we were back in the water, full of enthusiasm and ready for anything.
By the time we entered the Missinaibi River the wind had died down considerably. We put ashore for a planning conference. According to our trip map, Quittagene Rapids was just around the bend. Although it was listed as only a Class II rapid (Class VI being Niagara Falls), the notes warned it became trickier and more technical when water levels were intermediate. We scouted it out, took an informal vote and decided to try running it. Will and Larry volunteered to go first. They started off promisingly, but a short while later they spun out in an eddy and ended up facing backwards. Unless you’re Super Dave Osborne, going back asswards through rapids is highly discouraged. They wisely abandoned the attempt and returned to the riverbank. From there they used the canoe’s painter ropes to manually guide it safely through the foaming whitewater.
I was considering doing the same thing with my kayak when Yves winked at me and said: “Chance of a lifetime, man! You can do it!” Of course I had to take the challenge. We men are kind of stupid that way. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t as terrifying as it looked – the kayak seemed to naturally seek out the less riotous channels, so all I had to do was provide a little muscle and take evasive action whenever it looked like I was about to have a close encounter with a pointy rock. Ducking to avoid the overhanging sweepers and blasting out between the final set of boulders at the bottom was a real rush! A few minutes later the second canoe made its way through. We paddled for another hour before calling it quits and setting up camp for the night.
The next morning dawned cold. A beautiful ghost-like mist cloaked the river. Eventually the sun rose high enough to burn the haze away. We ate breakfast, packed up and slid our vessels into the water. The wind was at our backs and we had no major portages that day, so we made excellent time. By early evening we arrived at our new campsite. We pitched the tents, started a fire and ate a hearty supper. That night a thousand stars filled the heavens.
Saturday was our designated rest day. Activities included reading, writing, swimming, hiking, bird-watching and fishing. After lunch Will and John decided to paddle 30 minutes downstream to recon Sun Rapids. It was listed as a Class II technical, so they figured they wouldn’t have any trouble running it in an empty canoe. Several hours later they were still missing in action and the rest of us were beginning to worry. We were just getting ready to go search for them when they paddled into view. They were sodden and their canoe was sporting an impressive array of fresh dings and scrapes. It turned out they had run the rapids twice. The first time they selected a route that had them pass to the right of a huge boulder in the middle of the whitewater. The second time around they attempted to pass the boulder on the left, but the current caught them broadside and slammed them against it. At the moment of impact they were both catapulted into the turbulence and their paddles floated away. The incredible force of the rushing water pinned the canoe in place and bent it into a U-shape, inside-out, around the rock. Amazingly, it didn’t snap in two. While Will swam downstream through the rapids to retrieve the paddles, John stood in the pounding, chin-high water and struggled to pry the canoe loose. It had taken a unique combination of prayers, curses and Herculean effort, but eventually they were successful in both finding the paddles and freeing the canoe. Thanks to the Royalex material the canoe was made of, it sprang back into its normal shape as soon as it was off the rock. The journey back to our site depleted whatever little energy John and Will had left. They both slept like logs that night.
The next day we were all careful to give due respect to Sun Rapids’ now infamous canoe-eating boulder. It wasn’t difficult to spot, given the fact it was the only rock in the river with a wide strip of red paint on it. While the others lined the canoes down river left, I cautiously navigated my vessel through a kayak-friendly channel. The ensuing Barrel Rapids was also handled with kid gloves.
At last we arrived at the marshes of Peterbell, home to a wide variety of northern Ontario flora and fauna and the border of the Chapleau Crown Game Preserve. Years ago Peterbell was a thriving logging outpost community, but now it is completely devoid of human inhabitants. A VIA Rail train passes through it three times a week, and if a canoe party is waiting by the tracks the train stops and picks them up. We dragged our provisions ashore and set up camp in a field. Our plan was to get up early the next day and schlep our stuff to the tracks. When the train made its scheduled mid-morning appearance we’d be home free. We got a good blaze going, ate supper under a molten sky and traded war stories about prior canoe trips.
At 10:30 that night, Larry, Will and John turned in. Yves and I were still wide awake, so we stayed up late kibitzing. Shortly after 11:00 Yves stepped beyond the perimeter of flickering light cast by the fire to empty his bladder. A minute later he was back.
“I just saw a dog,” he said.
“Yves, we’re at least a hundred klicks away from the nearest house. Are you sure it was a dog?”
“Uh-huh. I think I’ll go call it. Maybe it’s hungry!”
Before I could say another word he turned around and was engulfed by the darkness once again.
“Here, doggy, doggy! Here, boy! Here… . Sacré bleu!”
In an instant he was back beside me. He looked totally freaked.
“What?” I asked.
“That was no dog!”
“What was it?”
“A wolf!”
“Yikes!”
We put another armful of dry logs on the fire and stayed up an extra hour before retiring to our sleeping bags.
At 0-dark-30 hours I was awakened by the sound of Larry climbing back into our two-man tent after the traditional early morning if-I-hold-it-any-longer-I’ll-explode pee.
“Hey,” I mumbled groggily, “While you were out there, did you happen to see that wolf?”
“What wolf?”
Just then a piercing, high-pitched howl began. It was so loud, it sounded like it was coming from the outside flap of our tent. Larry’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head.
“What the hell is that?” he whispered.
“A wolf. Yves saw it last night.”
The howling stopped abruptly. The sudden silence was almost as jarring as the unexpected wolf call had been.
“Should we – ?”
The howling began again, except this time it was eight times louder because many new voices were participating. The blood-curdling, ululating chorus went on and on, from every possible direction. Then it ceased, leaving echoes ricocheting around the insides of our skulls.
My heart was jack-hammering in my chest. Talk about a dramatic wakeup call! If those critters were hungry, our thin polyester tents weren’t going to be much of a deterrent to them. We armed ourselves with flashlights and unzipped the tent flap.
Yves, Will and John spilled out of their tent just as Larry and I emerged from ours. It was still dark enough to prevent us from seeing much past the glowing embers in the fire pit. Larry flicked on his flashlight and cast its beam of light northward into the gloom. A pair of green wolf eyes stared back at him. He aimed his flashlight south. Another wolf. East, west and several ordinal points in between – you guessed it. We were surrounded by a wolf pack.
“Say, guys,” I said, hoping no one noticed my voice’s sudden ascent to castrato. “Do wolves ever, um, eat people?”
“I… don’t think so,” replied Will.
“Are you sure about that?”
“No.”
The wolves stared at us silently for a long time before melting away into the shadows.
Not surprisingly, no one wandered off by themselves to wash their face in the river that morning. Instead, we skipped breakfast, set a new world record for disassembling a campsite and double-timed it to the train tracks. We were all very happy campers when the VIA train finally appeared in the distance.
Can’t wait for next year’s trip!
Tabula Rasa
Could someone please remind me why we strive so hard to keep Harry alive?
Harry is a severely handicapped middle-aged man. Cauliflower-shaped tumours burst out of his scalp and protrude through his patchy hair at irregular intervals. He grinds his teeth incessantly. It’s a loud, grating noise that makes you want to scream.
He has no intelligible speech. To be honest, he has nothing even vaguely resembling any sort of communication. He is unable to use his limbs in any purposeful manner, so he is permanently diapered and confined to a wheelchair.
Despite his group home attendants’ best efforts to feed him carefully, he still has frequent episodes of food aspiration and chest infections that leave him wheezing and gasping for air. Whenever this happens, he is immediately brought to our emergency department for treatment. We dutifully admit him to the medical ward and start him on oxygen, regular suctioning, bronchodilator inhalations and intravenous antibiotics. Sometimes he becomes so ill we have to intubate him and put him on a ventilator.
He has some relatives who have power of attorney over his affairs. They live less than an hour away. In the nine years I’ve known Harry they haven’t visited him once. I’ve called them on two occasions to ask whether they’d consider switching his code status to “do not resuscitate.” Both times their answer was the same: “Keep him alive, doc – we’ve been thinking about coming up to see him sometime.”
So the battle to save Harry continues. Day after day I go into his room and watch him struggle to breathe. It’s a Greek epic being played out in a hospital bed; an endless tragedy with a cast of one, viewed by an audience of one. To me, Harry embodies the combined suffering of Prometheus, Tantalus and Orpheus. Sir Laurence himself couldn’t evoke such pathos.
He cranes his head to the side in an attempt to look at me whenever I place my stethoscope on his misshapen chest. His moist, cow-like eyes roll in all directions. I often wonder if he’s going to bite me. It’s an irrational thought; Harry is wholly incapable of aggression.
Does Harry have thoughts? If so, how does he perceive this world? Is it a magical place or is it an unending horror? Are we his saviours or his tormentors? Does he admire us or despise us? Does he hope for life or death?
It may well be that his mind is a blank slate. If that’s the case, perhaps we shouldn’t stand in his way the next time we see him lumbering towards the brink.
Some Patients Are Never Ready
Two years ago Max noticed a trace of blood in his stool. Colonoscopy revealed bowel cancer. Staging investigations didn’t show any evidence of tumour spread. It was felt he had a good chance of surgical cure, so arrangements were made for a bowel resection.
The surgery went well. To everyone’s relief, the sampled lymph nodes came back negative for cancer cells. In the weeks following the operation it became evident that his surgeon and his oncologist held opposing views regarding the potential benefits of adjunctive chemo. After carefully considering both options, Max declined chemotherapy.
Six months later I was in the radiology suite looking at a surveillance x-ray of Max’s chest when I noticed a small lesion near the apex of his right lung. Uh-oh. Hard times ahead.
“What does it mean?” he asked when I saw him in my office the following day. “The cancer hasn’t come back, has it?”
“I hope not, but it’s possible,” I answered evasively. “I’m going to send you back to the cancer clinic. They’ll run some more tests and then do a biopsy.”
The scans confirmed our worst fear – the spot on his lung looked cancerous. No other traces of malignancy were found, though. The chest surgeon was hopeful the lesion was a new primary rather than a metastasis. If it had arisen de novo, removing it could be curative. If it turned out to be a metastatic subsidiary of the original cancer, his long-term prognosis would be abysmal.
Max’s lung surgery was uneventful. A month later he was back in my office to review his pathology results.
“Did they get it all?”
“It looks that way, judging by the reports.”
“Was it related to the first cancer, or was this one brand new?” His voice quavered slightly.
“They’re not sure – the pathology findings were inconclusive.”
“How could I have gotten lung cancer, doc? I never smoked a day in my life!”
“Well, every once in a while a non-smoker gets lung cancer. Just bad luck, I guess.”
“What happens next?”
“Chemotherapy.”
The chemo left Max weak and hairless, but he didn’t care. Anything to reduce the chances of a recurrence.
Six months later an abdominal ultrasound picked up a new lesion on his liver. Max nearly cried when I told him.
“What do we do now?” he asked. I sent him back to the cancer treatment centre. The chemo regimen he was given failed. So did the next one. After the third failure I tried to gently broach the topic of terminal cancer and palliative care, but he recoiled. “I don’t want to know how long I’ve got. I’m not ready to die yet.”
Max has undergone many more chemo and radiation treatments. Each successive scan shows more lesions than the one before.
My patient now weighs about 90 pounds. We’ve run out of treatments to offer. Although his emaciated body is riddled with cancer and his candle is slowly guttering, he’s still not yet ready to talk about dying.
I don’t think he ever will be.
Shotgun Bubba
“My husband and I are worried about Bubba. He’s been acting really weird lately and we think his schizophrenia might be getting out of control. He’s got this idea there are people hiding in the attic and they’re plotting to kill him.”
“Gee, that’s too bad. We may have to increase his antipsychotic medication.”
“Thanks, doc. Things have gotten so out of hand Bubba’s even refusing to go outside because he’s worried he’ll get kidnapped.”
“That sounds pretty paranoid. Is he saying or doing anything that makes you feel nervous or unsafe in any way?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, come to think of it, a couple of nights ago I was sitting on the toilet in the middle of the night when all of a sudden the bathroom door banged open and there he was with a shotgun in his hands!”
“A shotgun?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it loaded?”
“Oh yes, we always keep our guns loaded. Sometimes we get bears on our property.”
“Good grief!”
“Since then he’s taken to walking around the house with the shotgun all the time. He says he’s seeing spooky faces in the windows and holding a gun makes him feel safer.”
“Your paranoid, psychotic and hallucinating brother is patrolling your house night and day with a loaded shotgun and that doesn’t worry you?”
“Why should we worry? He never points it at us.”
Disneyfied
Little Tiffany’s dad has brought her in for her four-month well-baby check. She’s been healthy and so far everything looks normal. While I’m examining her eyes I ask her father: “Do you have any concerns about her vision?”
“No doc, as far as we know, her eyes are fine.”
“That’s good,” I reply.
“And she sure loves her Disney!”
“What?”
“Disney movies, doc. The cartoon ones! She just loves them!”
“She watches Disney movies?”
“Yeah, she can’t get enough of them!”
“But she’s only four months old! How long has she been watching television?”
“Oh, since she was about a month and a half. We put the TV right up beside her crib and prop her up on a pillow. Sometimes she’ll watch an entire movie! You should see her smile!”
“Um, several studies have suggested it’s better for kids to not watch television until they’re at least a year old.”
“Those guys don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Slippage
Things are slipping. It’s a steady, relentless process. Every day another inappropriate behaviour crawls out from under a rock and suns itself in plain view. What’s going on? And where will it end?
Not that long ago even the snarkiest adolescent would at least have made a token effort to not swear within earshot of an adult. My, how times have changed. Some of the language you hear from kids nowadays is harsh enough to make your ears bleed. More than once I’ve had to hastily round up my children and flee a playground in order to escape the profane chatter exploding all around us. I’m not just talking about the odd expletive being lobbed around. That doesn’t even make me blink anymore. No, I’m talking about the air being saturated with verbal shrapnel from continuous f-bombing. It’s like a sonic blitzkrieg. I’m no choirboy, but I’ve got my limits.
Where are kids learning such extreme language? Everywhere. Reality television, ultraviolent video games, laxly-censored movies, gangsta rap, shock radio… . The vulgarity envelope gets pushed a little further every day. You don’t have to be a nuclear physicist to recognize the linear relationship between unsupervised access to certain media and Potty Mouth Syndrome.
To make matters worse, there doesn’t appear to be a lower age limit to this worrisome phenomenon. Last fall Ellen started grade four. One day she was helping out in a kindergarten classroom at lunchtime. One of the littluns she was in charge of made a mess and casually strolled away from it. When Ellen reminded him to clean up, he glared at her and told her to f**k off. What’s next, fetuses cursing in utero?
Generation Z also seems to have no qualms about littering. It’s hard to believe the amount of garbage strewn around some playgrounds and schoolyards. The same can be said about the routes along which kids walk to get to school. The elderly widow across the street from us allows neighbourhood kids to cut through her yard on their way to and from school. How is her kindness repaid? Every day her property gets littered with empty pop cans and junk food debris. I’m surprised she doesn’t complain. Maybe she’s afraid to.
Our daughters get frustrated whenever they see people litter. Once Alanna asked a classmate why he dumps his trash on the playground every recess. His reply? “Someone else will pick it up.” I shouldn’t demonize kids who litter, though. Children learn through instruction and observation. A few months ago I went to the washroom at a movie theatre. A little boy and his father were standing in front of the urinals. The boy was holding a Kleenex. Try as he might, he just couldn’t manage to unzip his pants while maintaining his grip on the tissue paper. Eventually he asked his dad for help. “Just drop it on the floor,” his father advised. The boy complied. It was still on the floor when they left.
Recently I was waiting for a bus in Toronto when a pack of pre-teen girls carrying bags of McFood emerged from the subway. They leaned against a nearby retaining wall and proceeded to wolf down their pink-slime burgers. Despite the presence of a large garbage can a few feet away they all threw their leftover food, condiments and cups on the sidewalk. Partway through their feast the city worker responsible for keeping the area clean came by and swept up the mess. As soon as he was out of sight they tossed the rest of their garbage on the sidewalk and howled with laughter.
Yesterday I was out running when I came across an ice cream bar wrapper on the sidewalk. There were still flecks of unmelted ice cream on it, so I figured it must have been discarded only moments before. Half a block ahead of me a 12-year-old boy was pushing his bicycle up a hill. I jogged over to him and asked: “Did you just eat an ice cream bar?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is that the wrapper back there on the sidewalk?”
“Yeah.”
“You shouldn’t throw your garbage on the ground. That’s called pollution, and it’s bad for our community.”
He thought about it for a second and then grinned.
“Okay.” He rode back to the wrapper and put it in his pocket.
Perhaps there’s hope for the future after all.
My Organic Patient
I’m back in the emergency department, my home away from home. Run, rabbit, run… .
Mrs. Organic and her 14-year-old daughter are waiting to see me in cubicle B. Organic Jr. has a suspicious-looking mole they’d like to have looked at. It’s black, irregular and raised. Lately it’s gotten a bit bigger.
“Well, I think this mole needs to be removed. It’s a little too busy for me to do it right now, but if you like I can take it off tomorrow afternoon.”
“How is that done?” O.J. inquires.
“I inject some local anaesthetic, remove the mole with a scalpel and then sew up the skin.”
“How is the anaesthetic developed?”
“What?”
“How is the local anaesthetic manufactured? Do they use any live animals in the testing of it?”
“Our little Organic Jr. is very much against anything that’s bad for the environment and endangered ecosystems,” her mom pipes up. She’s practically glowing with pride.
“I have no idea how it’s manufactured.”
“Do you think I could have the procedure done without any freezing?” O.J. asks hopefully.
As long as you don’t wiggle around and scream too much! Your Birkenstocks might fall off!
“I wouldn’t really recommend that – it would be quite painful for you.”
“I think I’ll research it on the Internet and then decide.”
“That sounds like a great idea! I’ll await your call!”
The Wonderful World of Golf
Today my golf game was more frightening than The Exorcist. Anyone following me around with a movie camera would have had an instant horror classic on their hands. Divots the size of meteorites. Drives that dribbled to a halt less than 10 feet away. Missed putts any fetus could have sunk. Bizarre sideways shots that defied all known laws of physics. And let’s not forget those complete whiffs that left me looking like The Incredible Human Pretzel. I was so pitiful, even the blackflies stayed away from me. It didn’t always used to be this way. Believe it or not, I coulda been a contender. This is my sad tale.
I used to shake my head at golfers and their harebrained marches down the fairway. Who in their right mind would voluntarily spend hours of prime time chasing an irrelevant little dimpled ball all over hell’s half acre? Obsessive nutbars, that’s who. “Get a life!” I’d feel like yelling every time I passed a platoon of fanatics in Bermuda shorts traipsing around a golf course.
Near the end of my first year in medical school some of my classmates decided they were going to learn how to golf. They invited me to join them. Naturally, I declined. “A group of golfing doctors?” I scoffed. “How cliché can you get? Thanks, but no thanks.” Over the years many more invitations came my way, but I avoided them all like the plague.
Last summer my sister-in-law and her husband somehow managed to coerce me into playing a round of golf with them. As I prepared to tee off on the first hole I remember thinking, “This is going to be brutal.” It wasn’t. By the end of the game I was golf’s newest convert. I began hanging out at the local driving range. Within a month I was cranking out fairly consistent 200 yard drives. True, they were often directionally challenged, but let’s not quibble over details, okay? I bought a set of clubs and started playing regularly. To my surprise, I wasn’t half bad! My drives, chips, sand work and putts, though rough and unpolished, were respectable enough for a newb. Several regulars commented that my game had Potential. Delusions of future Tigerhood filled my head.
