The doctor's office

I've been struggling for about 2 weeks now with some sort of sinus infection that's ravaging my body, and it never fails that when you get around people the first thing they'll say is "Why don't you go see the doctor?"

Well, I'll tell you why...

To begin with, I'm not sure I like the idea of actually having to go inside the doctor's office.  The waiting room is basically like a large leper colony in which every sick person who's been to see the doctor that day has spent a great deal of time.  You walk in and the first thing you have to do is figure out where you're going to sit.  The way you do this is by looking at all the people in there and trying to decide which ones are the least sick and the least contagious.  If you're lucky you can find a few people who are there because of broken bones or torn ligaments or pulled muscles - if you're not, you find yourself debating whether to sit next to the guy who's sweating profusely with a glazed over look in his eyes or the lady with a hacking cough who refuses to even attempt to cover her mouth.  This is germ hell, and you are about to get a guided tour.  I mean, the first thing you have to do to get in there is touch the door handle that every infected, disease-carrying sick person in the entire county has used that day. 

Maybe this is their attempt at guaranteeing themselves repeat business, because there's no way this is a healthy situation to be in.  You go to the doctor for a sinus infection, but in order to see him you have to spend at least 2 hours sitting in a small, poorly-ventilated room with people who are on the verge of death from some rare plague.  How is sitting next to someone with the flu going to help me get over my sinus infection?  How can this be something a doctor would recommend?  If I asked him whether or not I should go spend a few hours hanging out with a truckload of typhoid patients, he'd surely say no...but he has no problem with me chillin' in his waiting room for hours at a time amongst the living dead. 

Doctor's are always telling you to wash your hands, but what about the clothes you wear in the waiting room?  I can tell you that as soon as I get home from the doctor's office, I immediately strip down and isolate the clothes I was wearing...I'll leave them someplace for at least a week so that any microscopic organisms die off...and only then will I wash them, by themselves, at least once and with the extra rinse cycle. 

When you go to put your name on the waiting list, the receptionist working there has to treat you like a brand new patient who looks like they'll leave without paying.  How many times do you need to scan my freaking insurance card?  It's plastic and it's laminated, so it's not like the information is changing all that much.  They ask you on the sign-in sheet whether or not your insurance has changed, and you put "NO", and then they go "Sir I need to scan your insurance card."  At this point, once they see that you've stated that your insurance information has not changed, and once they look at your card for the 35th time to verify that it has not changed, they...get you to fill out paperwork to give them your insurance information again!  Sometimes I think they just throw that paperwork away and get you to fill it out each time to help make the hours you'll spend waiting to get treatment seem shorter.  It's a way to make you waste time, which they specialize in.

I'm not one to question the wisdom of my doctor, but is it really necessary for me to get an X-Ray every single visit?  It seems like no matter what is wrong, they always want to see my skeletal system up close and personal.  "Stuffy nose huh?  We better X-Ray your entire body to see exactly what is going on here."  "Sounds like you've sprained your ankle...but just to be sure lets get some X-Rays of your head and chest area."  If I walk in and I've got snot dripping from my nose and sound like I've got an entire washcloth stuffed up each nostril, do you really need an X-Ray to determine what the problem is?  THERE'S GREEN CRAP COMING OUT OF MY NOSE - MAYBE IT'S A FREAKING SINUS INFECTION YOU DOLT!  But no...let's do a series of X-Rays just to make sure that it's actually snot and not radioactive material leaking from the nuclear core hidden in my brain that's only visible via a CAT scan.

I long for the day when I can go to the pharmacy and buy antibiotics over the counter...

"Well Mr. Conner, it appears that you are completely unable to breathe due to copious amounts of thick, nasty-looking mucous in your nasal passages.  Just to be sure, I'd like to snake a tube up inside your colon and take a look around, and then assuming your paperwork is in order and the background check comes back ok  I'll give you some medicine."