Dear Diary: Nekkid
Preventive Medicine 102: I had an appointment with the dermatologist today. I pretended, to her assistant, that I didn’t really know why I was there. I could show off my lovely Mohs-surgery scar, and did. When Dr G peeled back the bandage, she and the technician cooed approvingly, and I wondered if they were thinking what I thought when I changed the bandage on Monday: that I was at Greenberg’s, looking at an impressively frosted cake. But if Dr G had referred the squamous-cell biopsy to Dr B, the Mohs surgeon, that was the end of her involvement. I wasn’t there for her to look at my Hostess Cupcake stitchery.
Nor was I really there for her to do a follow-up exam of [TMI]. I was there, the technician reminded me, for a full-body exam. Ick. I protested; excuses proliferated. Dr G reminded me that the exam was overdue; she also said, “I sound like your mother.” Mind you, I would not be going to a doctor who was old enough to be my mother. Dr G is older than my daughter, but not by much.
Because the [TMI] problem involved a degree of unbuckling and unbuttoning, I said to hell with it, meaning my resistance, and agreed to disrobe. Dr G naturally had to leave the room (?), but she promised to be right back. When she did not come right back, I realized that what I hate most about medical examinations is sitting around in my underwear (or worse). I do not sit around in my underwear at home. It bothers me not to be presentable. The fact that I’m at a doctor’s office makes no difference. Underwear is underwear.
After a long absence, Dr G returned, bursting with apologies. Even better, she ventured, as she began to examine the upper half of me, to ask my advice. Since I was a thoughtful person — how on earth had my dermatologist come to that conclusion? — what did I make of the very rude patient with whom she’d been dealing while I sat around in my underwear. The very rude patient was a thirty-something trophy wife who had to have everything done yesterday, in order to fly to Europe next week, and who not only didn’t want to pay for it, but couldn’t pay for it, notwithstanding such accoutrements as a Birkin bag in a color not seen before, Pucci everything-else, and a couple of Cartier tennis bracelets. Dr G was so exasperated that she suggested — “for the first time, really; I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never lost it before” — that the lady “trade in” one of her bracelets for the cosmetic procedure that she didn’t want to/couldn’t pay cash American for. Astonishing fun though this repartee was, Dr G still wanted to know what the woman could have been thinking, carrying on the way she did.
I said that her refusal to pay was meant to signify that she was too important a person to have to pay for things. Dr G and the technician stepped back a bit and admired me — there is no other word, etymologically — as if I were some science fiction wizard. “You ought to be a shrink,” they said. I thought of all the shrinks who have not said this to me, and felt better about the full-body exam process. Sadly, not so much about the underwear.
Did I say “Pucci”? Dates me, don’t it.