I finally went to the doctor this morning for my physical. Its only about 17 years now since a doctor in Saskatoon told me I needed a family doctor. That's about par for the course in how I approach the medical profession.

What a disaster the trip turned out to be. That office is a complete nightmare. How they do anything successfully I will never understand. I think they'd actually lost my appointment. It was an appointment I had to schedule 6 weeks ago because they simply had no spaces available any sooner. She looked at that chart for a long time but didn't say anything. If I go on what the doctor said, it sounds like they called him in from a day off. I heard two other people say they were there to see the same doctor. I have to assume he was called in to see patients the office staff had been booked, when he thought he was free.

To compound their uselessness, the nurse/receptionist puts me in the little examining room but doen't include any of the documentation of my file. So the doctor had to leave for what must have been 10 minutes, to find the results of tests that he'd had me do, and the notes he'd written last time.

The whole experience was a gong-show nightmare. I think he left the room about 5 times, to look something up or get more information. Each trek away was at least 5 minutes of waiting. Meanwhile I'm sitting there in my shorts, and nothing else, because that's what the nurse woman said to do. He's supposed to be giving me a physical, right? All he did for examing was look in my throat, my right ear, and do some listening with the stethesope. Now admittedly, I'm probably in pretty good health. Nevertheless, I did all this blasted waiting for that much interest in how I am?

Anyway, we get to the point of what I'm concerned about, and I tell him the problems I'm having. Lots of diarrhea, bad headaches, neck pain, dizzy spells. At the very least he did hone in on the damn headaches and we investigated that for a few minutes. (oh yeah, he also examined my feet, for reasons that are not clear to me) Sounds like migraines, he says to me. At least you got that right! So he offers me some migraine medication and promises to book me in to see a neurologist. So maybe we're going to get somewhere with the headaches.

But he gives me these migraine pills and I ask, is there anything wrong with taking these with my other medications? He doesn't know (obviously) and thus we had another long trip out of the room. Well golly gee shit, turns out the migraine pills ARE contra-indicated for people taking Prozac. It is possible to get something called 'serotonin syndrome'. I ask if that's bad and he says yeah, it could kill you. So he put exactly that much thought into prescribing me a medication, given the medical history I'd now told him about twice.