I remember waiting at the doctor's office. I filled out the 4 to 5 pages of personal information. Carefully laid out the medications I had been prescribed and the reasons why I was being referred. I was a bit nervous because I was having horrendous abdominal pain that was radiating to my chest and back. Initially, I thought I was having a heart attack, but my young age and the million-dollar work-up at the local emergency room had convinced physicians otherwise. This pain was so severe I would break out in a cold sweat and when it hit I literally felt like I was going to die. The emergency room physician walked into the room, looked at my chart and while buried in my information stated, "looks like you're going to live".
I did live, but was referred to a gastroenterologist (stomach, liver, and intestinal specialist) and thus I was sitting patiently in the office waiting to be called back. At the time I was a resident physician and felt somewhat bulletproof, but this pain had caused even me to look at the possibility that I had some fatal disease. As I sat and rummaged through the two-year-old magazines in the waiting room I watched as other patients were being called up before me until I was the last one in the waiting room. Time inched along and I was eventually 90 minutes past my appointment time when the receptionist told me the doctor was running behind, but I was next. Thirty minutes later I was called back into an exam room and asked to undress for this doctor I had never met. Sitting with the cloth gown draped over my exposed posterior I wondered how many patients this gown had covered in its lifetime. How many housewives, construction workers, grandfathers, and nurses had this gown attempted to cover? It was during this deep internalization that the gastroenterologist walked into the room and looked me up and down.
"OB-GYN resident yes?" he said looking over his rose colored glasses.
"Yep" I said, trying to make a connection on that doc to doc level.
He set my chart on the counter, "What rotation are you on right now?"
"Gynecologic Oncology" I responded. The cancer rotation for our profession.
He put a glove on, "How many hours you working a week?"
"I don't know probably 80-100". I said hoping the glove wasn't going where I thought it was going.
He snapped the glove off and shot it across the room into the trashcan, "You're stressed big guy".
That was it. I waited two hours, read Good Housekeeping, and repressed my anger of waiting and this was my diagnosis? This was the moment I had been waiting to see this doctor? Well, he couldn't have been more right. Over the past 15 years I have had this chest pain come and go, usually during times of intense stress (writing this blog perhaps), and it has been a recent discovery to me that I wish I would have spent those 90 minutes waiting in that office in the Bikram Yoga studio or in deep meditation.
The 90-minute checkup is a place for us to explore the aspects of certain dis-ease from the vantage point of what we could accomplish spending 90 minutes together in the office rather than the 10-15 we currently see. It is my hope to give you plans and ideas for common issues so you might not have to spend that time in the waiting room waiting for the epiphany I received. Obviously, nothing substitutes for proper face-to-face health care, but sometimes it is good to be armed with the mind-body knowledge of our current age.
Here's to healing.