Parting ways with my physicians left me at a crossroads.
By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
I don’t like to brag, but I’ve always been good at seeing the 3D image in 3D Magic Eye posters. Look once, you see a field of zigzagging blue shards; look a second time, see something that could pass for a dolphin swimming through a field of zigzagging blue shards. It’s a skill, and it’s marketable, in beach boardwalk shops and a few very specific illusionist Pinterest boards.
I had the sensation of that strange second look the year I went off my parents’ health insurance and purchased my own, because there are a lot of good doctors in Northern Virginia. But look again, and there are a lot of bad doctors, too.
I don’t fault the insurance. I am sure there were many fine doctors on that plan, only I had never selected a doctor before. Having called the same Manassas address home for 23 years, I went to the same doctors. In that time, my doctors came to know my charts backwards and forwards. They didn’t call me by my first name; they called me by my nickname. These were the people who taught me how to put in contact lenses, to floss my teeth, to take my birth-control pill at the same time every day. In grade school, I spent every third Tuesday morning getting my braces tightened by the same man. I felt loyal to my doctors. They were loyal to me. I was my general practitioner’s daughter’s maid of honor.
Even so, I didn’t realize how many doctors I had, until I didn’t have any doctors. When I changed plans, I asked a girl at work for the name of her dermatologist. She had been hired even more recently than I had been, but she gave me a name and it was on the list. A phone call to the Alexandria office didn’t raise any red flags.
On arriving, there were a couple red flags. Gray stuffing was spilling out the armrests in the waiting room. The fish were practically panting from their low tank water levels. The lights flickered, and there were flyers advertising the lawn-work services of one of the firm’s doctors. I signed in, then called my coworker on her cellphone to ask where she had gotten the name. She folded fast, admitting she found him on the Internet and hadn’t yet met him herself. If it’s uncomfortable, she told me, get out of there. I could practically hear her other hand punching the numbers on her work phone to cancel her own pending appointment.
To myself, I reasoned that I didn’t want to be classist. I reasoned further that I’d been planning on taking the whole morning off work. Plus I had already told the front desk I was there. It would be rude to take the free lawn-work flyers thrust upon me and run.
Eventually I was called back to see the doctor, whose very watery, very protruding eyes made me feel as though my pores were magnified under their gaze, and he wasn’t any parts thrilled about it. I was imprisoned in his exam room no fewer than 90 minutes, the longest medical appointment of my life, during which I was diagnosed with six skin conditions. (I didn’t treat any of them, yet here I stand.) Now and then he managed to set aside feelings of contempt for my face to treat me to his opinions on the Democratic Party, his ex-wife and the slipshod skincare routine of the patient before me.
I spent nights awake knowing that my phone number lived in a manila folder in his office, and resolved to be more selective in the future.
The next month I needed a renewed birth-control prescription from a gynecologist. This was a more delicate search, but I didn’t want to take chances. I talked to several coworkers, plus a few friends and my roommate. I reviewed the Internet boards for myself. After the last time, I was looking for a seasoned and no-nonsense professional.
My appointment with the Reston doctor I’d selected was for eight o’clock in the morning. I signed in with the receptionist at 8:03. Hardly a minute had passed before I was whisked back to an exam room where my physician, a terror of a woman wearing latex gloves and a glower, was already waiting. She asked me if I knew how many minutes late I was, or how many patients she had scheduled to see that day. She may as well have snapped the finger of her right glove before pointing to the curtained partition where I could undress.
I wondered if I’d been coddled by my doctors until this point in my life, if knowing them all as a young girl had led them to treat me, even into adulthood, as a young girl. I thought about other times I’d had to see doctors outside my regular team. Two visits to the emergency room stuck out as memorable, one for a gash to the head when I was 6 years old, another for appendicitis when I was 25. At 6, I was treated to my choice of Tootsie Pop, for having bravely endured stitches. At 25, I got to eat cream- and gelatin-based desserts every meal, for having bravely endured laparoscopic abdominal surgery that required a diet of soft foods.
Now, overdue for a tooth cleaning, I longed for my old dentist, the same one who’d squeezed my teeth straight every three weeks for two years, a meek man whose office had consisted of only three rooms. He had worked with a single hygienist and his wife, who sat at the front desk with a stack of Highlights magazines and knew all our pets’ names.
This time, I wasn’t going to screw up. I asked everyone for the name of their dentists, then counterchecked them against “Best of” lists in magazines and tarot-card readings of the numbers corresponding to their first and last initials. I decided on a man in Chantilly who had a sterling record by all counts, then arrived early for my appointment, filling the paperwork out with handwriting I practiced first on a receipt.
I was ushered back by a punctual and smiling hygienist, who draped a bib over my shirt and made small talk appropriate to a dentist’s, asking questions I could answer with happy or neutral grunts. I began to relax and pay less attention to the assembly of metal instruments cropping out of my mouth. My mouth was watering some but I didn’t think much of it.
After a while, my hand seemed to keep getting in the way of a plastic stick bumping into it. I tried repositioning, but wherever I went, the stick, being scooted around by the hygienist, followed. Finally I understood that I was meant to grab hold of the stick and pop it into my mouth to vacuum out my saliva. Had I never used a suction pump before? I garbled apologies and explained how my old dentist had used a spit cup. The hygienist was amazed. He had last seen a spit cup, he confessed, at a conference he attended in 1980s Hungary.
Briefly, I wondered if my loyalty had been misplaced, whether my childhood dentist had been out of touch since my fifth birthday and I’d just never known better. Then the hygienist paged my new dentist, and what little I saw of him, I liked fine. We didn’t talk much, but there wasn’t much to say. My X-rays checked out. I didn’t need drill work. He checked under my top lip and praised the bright pink of my gums.
Someone, he said, really taught you how to floss.
@CitySprawlNVMag offers free medical advice on Twitter.
(November 2014)