This, Not That: Part 1

I went to the doctor last week. It’s not something I normally do.

You see, my dad was a corpsman in the Navy (a medic, more or less) and he had a very simple approach to health care. It went like this:

• If there was no blood, you were fine.
• If there was blood, you said a bad word and then put pressure on it for a minute.
• If it was still bleeding, you doused the wound with alcohol and put a band-aid on it.
• If the miraculous duo of a band-aid and alcohol didn’t do it, you were allowed to stop work and sit down. Reapplication of the alcohol and band-aid could occur.
• If you were still bleeding, an old hand towel would be placed on the wound and then tightly bound with duct tape.
• If, by some miracle, the towel/duct tape combo didn’t work after an hour or two, then it was time to think about going to the hospital.

NOTE: My mom had the sole power of circumventing the above steps and having someone taken to the hospital. She was not a firm believer in the power of duct tape.

Now, you’re obviously thinking that I’m exaggerating for the sake of comedy, but let me assure you, the above list actually happened on more than one occasion.

This is a true story: when I was fourteen and working with my dad on a construction project, a framing hammer (32 ounces) was dropped on my head from about twenty feet up. I remember blinking and realizing I was lying on the ground. I sat up, got really dizzy, almost threw up, and the laid back down again. My dad appeared above me and said (I quote) ‘just rest there a minute, you’ll be fine.’ At some point later, he yelled at me to stop goofing off and get back to work. Which I did.

The above story was not to suggest that my dad was a horrible beast who regularly allowed his children to work with power tools while mildly-concussed. He did the same thing when he was injured as well. Three of his fingers were once smashed under a steel I-Beam. He jumped around for a minute, said multiple bad words, and then duct-taped his fingers together and continued working.

The doctor, as far as I knew, was someone you only saw if an actual limb was severed (happened – seriously, ask me to show you my finger).

So there I was, in the doctor’s office for a follow up after a physical and a blood test. My doctor is a tiny Asian woman who talks very, very fast. She showed me a printout and pointed at some numbers. “These are very bad,” she said. “See this one?” She pointed at a particularly high number. “That’s very, very bad.”

“How bad?” I asked.

“Make you dead bad,” she responded.

Yeah, my doctor rocks.

Tomorrow: Part 2