Shaking Hands With The Doctor Who Saved My Father's Life

"Goddammit, Adi, I told you to be ready by twelve!" Mom shouted at me through the bathroom door, more than fifteen minutes before the agreed time. "Why do you always do this right before we have to leave?" She kept talking to herself at this point, an acquired skill that every mother seems to possess.

For punk's sake, it's not like it will take me more than 3 minutes to dress up! I rolled my eyes at Mom's sense of urgency. My latest blood tests showed "there might be an infection somewhere," and we had to act fast, considering the plethora of health issues I have accumulated - she kept pestering me.

No matter how welcoming and professional medical practitioners are, or how life-saving modern medicine is, nobody's going to the doctor with the same enthusiasm as when you're going ice skating. Especially when an inevitable surgery is on the horizon.

Keeping things in proportion, now I know a tiny bit of what my father felt. Everybody keeps assuring me it's a mildly intrusive intervention and has urged me to do it because it will improve my life, but surgery is still surgery in my book.

So… of course, ugh… I dragged my feet.

By the time Mom was very close to blowing her top, I surgically got out of the bathroom, not too soon, not too late, and got dressed in like… thirty seconds.

Two minutes later… mostly due to her forgetting where she put her glasses, we stepped out of the door.

Perhaps the wheels of fortune took a vengeful turn in compensation for how smooth all of our appointments went the day before, when we visited our family physician and procured all the state-compensated referrals, because as soon as we got out of the tram, it was pretty clear that the bus we switched to was severely delayed.

As if she were not the one who insisted we take the public transportation instead of Uber, as I proposed, Mom kept "na-mom-gging" me until we finally arrived at the destination. But when we stepped out of the bus, in the proximity of the hospital, she got unusually quiet.

You could see it in her gait. That road is more familiar than any of us wished for.

We were visiting the same hospital where my dad got his first cancer suspicion diagnosis. The same doctor, too. He was referred to us by another physician, without us specifically looking for him.

What are the odds? That astronomical, it seems…

Walking through the gates, what greeted us was a small complex, a little bit rustic, archaic even, befitting of its direct proximity to the old town center, where all the patrimonial buildings are located, but tidy-looking and clean. Each floor still has its old wooden doors, repainted with a neutral shade of gray, which is not too heavy on the eye, in contrast with the state-of-the-art, modern, and spacious elevator that smoothly glides up and down between the floors.

There's a soothing mix of old and new, as if someone went to meticulously great lengths to divert the hospital funds right where they were needed the most. A pragmatic manager is exactly what every institution needs. But I digress…

As soon as I approached the corridor, I smelled a heavy hint of tobacco, although I couldn't pinpoint where it came from. Most likely, the lodge - that ajar, slightly creaking door from where a tiny but sharp, tentacular breeze pinched the tip of my nose and earlobes.

Amid a small cluster of gray doors, one of them stood out from the rest. The name on the door was heavily mandated with a long string of titles and positions: professor, doctor, whatever, director, chief of who knows what. That was our guy.

"Is Mr. P. in his office?" Mom asked a passing nurse.

"Yes. Of course." She replied before walking into what we had previously established to be the loge.

Mom lightly knocked on the door and snuck her head through the half-opened door, greeting a vaping, bandana-wearing, proportionally chubby hipster with one-third of his chest exposed through a generous V-shaped medical garment shirt.

Once we were invited in, I followed my mother as we politely barged into a small cabinet where a hardwood desk, chair, and shelves were squeezed in alongside a modern, stylish, and unexpectedly fluffy sofa. "That's the sofa he was lying on that time your father and I went to see him. He even kept his sleeping mask on while talking with us. I guess he was tired after coming out of surgery," Mom remarked later on, when we left the hospital.

The upper side of his right chest was marred by a sizable brown, smudge-like mole or skin condition, which, compared to his panda-like, goofy, lip-puckering facial expression during vaping, gave him a subtle, ferocious look that both amused and distracted me long enough for Mom to finish her introduction, "Mr. P., you probably don't remember me, but I came to you with my husband… […] Now, I'm here with my kid…"

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at her for calling me her "kid" instead of "son" after she passed the baton to me with her eyes and told the doctor why we came to him, my medical history, and showed him my latest scans and blood test, instead of the sarcastically "No, no, I'm merely someone's child; please, speak to my wise progenitor who always seems to know better" wannabe smart-aleck reply that crossed my mind.

And, just like I feared, it didn't take long before my surgery date was set. On December 2nd, in the early morning, I will be hospitalized, and if all the tests come up right, on December 3rd, Mr. P. will remove my gallbladder.

Shite. Now there's no backing down anymore. This will go down. I put on a stoic face while the grizzly doc stood up on his hind limbs and vigorously shook my hand, mano a mano, before we said goodbye.

Hopefully, at the end of it, I will be just another happy customer of our public healthcare.

***

All cheeky exaggerations aside…

This "infection," which in my case seems to be an inflammation that doctors don't place much importance on for now, was like a recurring nightmare for my poor mother. Back when Dad suffered through his cancer surgery, he had to deal with something similar, so when my C-Reactive Protein levels came out double the frame of reference, she basically grabbed my hand and took me to the doctor, like a veritable mother hen.

At the moment, I thought she made a big deal out of my gallbladder stones and me delaying the inevitable, something that all of my doctors told me I'll have to do eventually - removal surgery. But mulling over Mom's behavior a few days after our doctor appointment… like how she went back alone, claiming she forgot to ask something trivial, and how we stopped by a church on our way back home… she most likely feared another cancer scare.

Although she denied it when I confronted her earlier today, a quick Google search (that even my mother knows how to do) would reveal that one of the causes of high C-reactive protein levels is cancer. But so are a bunch of other reasons, big or small. And to be fair, there are plenty of issues my 3rd-degree fatty liver, type 2 diabetes, elevated pulse, and gallbladder stones can cause… each one by itself; let's not even mention the cumulative damage.

It's very unlikely we're dealing with the dreaded C-word, but for the first time since my declining health diagnosis, I have realized things are a little bit more serious than I made them out to be. Something needs to be done!

Now, I'm mentally preparing myself for my hospitalization, which I honestly dread more than the surgery itself. The thought of having to spend 2 or 3 nights in the hospital is not that appealing. Not to mention, I will have to sleep on my back, which is almost impossible for me.

Mom scheduled a family meeting for later on tonight, in which she and Dad will walk me through everything I'll need to know during my hospitalization: dos and don'ts, tips and tricks, and all that. Knowing her, it will be a meticulous waterboarding session of information, from how to put on my slippers the right way (really, Mom?) to whatever, the actual stuff I can actually put to good use. But I rest my case.

One day, when my parents are gone, no one else will be treating me like I'm ten years old. And I'm pretty sure that no matter the age, or more precisely, the older you are, the harder that feeling sinks in.