Spin doctors / The doctor will patronise you now |
How a profession speaks to its subjects is always of interest to a writer, sometimes perversely so. Over the past few weeks a persistent problem with my foot worsened and appeared to take charge of things. (This isn’t going to be a piece moaning about ill health, I should reassure you.) The hospital took soundings of the ulcer, now turned into infection: first with a probe, then an X-ray, then an MRI scan, and finally the consultant manifested himself. The infection was in the bone and showed no sign of retreating under the antibiotics. It looked as if an operation was unavoidable, to remove – the consultant paused in his explanation – ‘We’re just going to take a kind of little nibble at the toe,’ he said.
I regarded him levelly. ‘Could you explain,’ I said, ‘the distinction in surgical terms between “a kind of little nibble” and partial amputation?’ The question disconcerted him. Talking to friends afterwards, plenty had their own stories to tell of doctors deciding to explain a medical issue to them in terms apparently designed for a not very clever nine-year-old. These patients were all well-educated, articulate, professional people, and yet one found a doctor telling her what her course of chemotherapy might have done to ‘the naughty cells’. ‘I had to listen to a doctor asking my father about his “wee-wee”,’ another said. ‘My God, he’s written books about Sophocles.’
‘I had to listen to a doctor asking my father about his “wee-wee”. My God, he’s written books about Sophocles’
The prize, for the moment, for the ludicrously infantile goes to the doctor dealing........