Stevieslaw: What’s Up Doc?
I had an appointment with my eye doctor this morning. I’m fine, just an elevated pressure in one eye that is responding to medication. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that the nurse who shepherded me from examination room to examination room had finally taken to wheeling my medical records behind her in a cart, rather than trying to carry them. There must have been twenty pounds of old eye exams—prescriptions, pressure readings, cataract surgery results—in a series of tired manila folders. In the waiting room, I took the time to notice that my file was not the largest to occupy the long wall behind the receptionist’s desk.
No. This is not a rant for computerized record keeping. The truth is that when the doctor came in he only needed to leaf briefly through my charts—more, I suspect because they were there than that he needed to. You see, I have been seeing my eye doctor for decades. He knows pretty much all there is to know about me. The same is true of my physician, my dentist, my financial advisor and my lawyer. One happy consequence of living in a small town is that we seem to grow with our support. The corollary is that all of these people are about my age and perhaps ready to exchange a stethoscope for a fishing rod and retire someplace where the winters aren’t so wearing.
That thought has been weighing on my mind. What if they all retire at the same time, leaving me with stacks of manila folders and a collection of 25 year olds who call me Mister and mangle my last name? According to my therapist, I am not paranoid, but it was disturbing that a brochure in her waiting room that advertised a retirement community in the Florida Keys was the same brochure that I saw in a stack of papers my dermatologist was carrying when he came in to burn a precancerous whatnot off my brow. Worse, just this morning, I thought I saw them all sharing a table at the Corner Room. Ha! If you want breakfast, you go to the Waffle Shop—they were attending a meeting. Was it a getting out of State College meeting?
I want you all to know that I am on to you. You won’t get rid of me easily. I am watching you and at the first sign of exodus, I will buy a Greyhound ticket and follow you down. And I suggest to all my friends of an age—you know who you are—that you’d better start watching your bunch of aging professionals as well.