I’ve talked a lot about going to the doctor in my time writing The Archivist’s Pen. That shouldn’t be too much of a surprise; I was born with a disability and I’ve spent a lot of time going to the doctor. A person can go to many different kinds of doctor for many different reasons, and some visits will last longer than others. Annual checkups aren’t going to take as long as a full-body x-ray, after all, and on average the longer a type of doctor’s appointment is the less frequently that procedure will be required. Even though long doctor’s visits are a rare occurrence there’s still a time in everyone’s life where they have to make an appointment to see some sort of specialist. These visits are inconvenient and time-consuming, but in my opinion they’re worth the hassle. Human bodies are complex things and I’d rather have to spend a little more time getting my issues looked at by an expert on the heart or the ear than by the nearby town clinic where they aren’t equipped to handle major procedures. Clinics are convenient and the doctors there know a little bit about the whole body, which is enough to know when something’s a little funky about a patient without having the knowledge to treat it. They still know more about medicine than I do with a humanities degree, but it’s specialized doctors who really know how to handle the big stuff. Unfortunately part of what makes specialist doctors so special is that there’s not as many of them, which you become incredibly aware of when trying to schedule an appointment or find one to go to for a new medical issue in your life. When you need a medical specialist, you have to go to a medical specialist. People like that are never just a walk down the street.
Going to a specialist doctor is almost always an all-day affair, whether the appointment itself ends up taking that long or not. You have to leave early so you’ll have time to spare, get in your car (or someone else’s car – depending on your condition you might not be up to driving yourself), drive to a city, take whatever roads you can to avoid traffic (there’s always traffic), still end up stuck behind a plethora of cars and at least one city bus, get temporarily lost because you turned one block before you were supposed to, and you’ll still somehow arrive within one minute of your appointment’s agreed-upon start time. This is the case whether you leave home fifteen minutes early or factored in an extra two hours to accommodate travel difficulties. It might seem like magic but the truth is probably that you’ve only been to the place where you’re having your appointment once or twice in the past year (if you’ve been there before at all) and you aren’t familiar with the quirks and eccentricities of driving in that particular city. Modern cities were designed with cars in mind, but not in the sense that the people driving those cars have an easier time getting where they need to go; it’s a whole other topic that has very little to do with the starting premise of this article, so just remember that the point I’m making is that traffic and city roads will fight you no matter how well you think you’ve planned ahead. Don’t expect that you’ll be able to fit in some errands before your appointment or you’ll find yourself running behind and arguing with your GPS about a shortcut to the doctor’s office you vaguely remember from when you visited two years ago. It’s not a fun experience.
Despite all the effort you’ll have gone through to make it to your doctor’s office on time for your appointment with the specialist you’ll still have to wait a while in the waiting room. As far as I can understand the matter doctor time is somehow different from time as perceived by mere mortals such as ourselves. This allows them to always be right on time for an appointment, even if that appointment was scheduled to begin an hour ago. It’s a bit like wizard time in the sense that a wizard is never late or early, arriving precisely when they intend to. Unlike wizard time, doctor time is only as flexible as it is because the appointment can’t really go anywhere until the doctor shows up. Without them it’s just you and anyone you might have brought along sitting in a room full of things you aren’t allowed to touch. Don’t try and call your doctor out on their lack of punctuality by the way, because that just makes it incredibly awkward when they have to see you without your pants on or need to check your vitals. Instead spend the mandatory time in the waiting room doing something constructive like looking at maps of the city to plot quicker routes for next time or stare at the other weirdos cooling their heels until doctor time aligns with the real world. You probably don’t come to this area very often so the people-watching has the exotic feeling of going on safari in a foreign country.
Some specialists are so special that it takes more than a day to visit them. If a medical issue is rare enough or severe enough there may be only a few hospitals in the world that can handle it properly. It could also just be a case of one hospital in the world being known as the best in a particular field. They could have a cutting-edge program that devotes major funding to treatment, diagnosis, or recovery, which is pretty tempting if you can find a way to get an appointment. These specialists among specialists draw in a lot of patients since it’s often believed they can pull off what other doctors can’t. Demand like that makes appointments harder to get quickly, while the rarity of doctors operating on that level of skill draws in people from all over the place. Some people stay at hotels, some people stay with friends or relatives in the area, and if a treatment is important enough some people will just move closer to the hospital. When I was younger (I was eighteen at the time) I went to a hospital in Minneapolis to get my cerebral palsy and gait examined, and it was a big deal. My parents and I stayed in a motel overnight that my mom said looked better online, we had to search around for Christian radio stations every time we drove out of range of one we knew, and they used machinery I’d never seen used in medicine before. They performed motion-capture on my legs as I walked and measured how much energy I used while going up and down a hallway – it was crazy stuff. While we were waiting to see my test results my parents and I sat for a while in a glass-walled skybridge connecting two hospital buildings, and I noticed some things as I looked around. There were people there from six of the seven continents (to my knowledge Antarctica wasn’t represented) and the hospital was throwing a barbecue on a terrace garden a few floors down from the bridge to reward their doctors for their hard work. I felt like I’d been forced to go out of my way by driving in from a different state, but there were people in need of specialized care who’d been willing to cross oceans and who knows how many countries to get a doctor’s appointment. Back when I was eighteen I just thought it was neat to see people from different countries but now I’m older and looking back it puts my problems in perspective. There are people who have to find the funds to travel the globe and pay American medical bills if they want to ensure a healthy future for their children, their spouse, or themselves. Meanwhile I complain about traffic on the drive to a doctor whose stretching advice I ignore.
When we’re healthy we tend to forget how lucky we are to live in a world where so much has been discovered about treating the flaws in a human body. When we’re ill we tend to be ungrateful for all the work that goes into getting us back in one piece. Treatment might feel like it’s taking too long, or it could be uncomfortable, or it could get in the way of things we’d rather be doing with our time. Trust me, I’ve been there, and so have many of the people you know. Some of them wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for the doctors who’d been there for them – chemotherapy, botox injections, corrective surgery, and so many other procedures have saved or improved the quality of lives. They’re all things that can take days or even months out of our schedules and require trips to specialists, but if they can improve the quality or increase the quantity of my life I think it’s worth a little inconvenience every now and then.
The Archivist's Pen 
I just finished a book where one of the main biographical figures was a doctor. He became so popular that it tended to be an all-day wait for him. Part of his skill, though, was that he spent a lot of time with each person, believing that personal interest, concern was an important part of helping them get better. And… it often seemed that was the case. For some others, they loved the care, but gave up on him because of the all-day effort. (Some found a compromise—they’d save a place in line, do shopping and errands, and then come back.)
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