When I was growing up, if you were sick, you went to a doctor. Those were strange times. Nowadays, if you’re sick, the doctor doesn’t want to see you. I mean, you’re sick! If doctors saw sick people all day, every day, do you know what their life expectancy would be?
So no; doctors only see you if you’re healthy – they call it a well visit -- and then they tell you that you have stuff that there’s no physical evidence that you actually have and that you should take pills forever. If you’re actually sick, you have to go to an emergency room or Urgent Care, which I suppose are staffed by doctors also, but your official doctors -- whose names you write on forms at least once a week -- don’t have to take responsibility for what those doctors say, and you never see those doctors again. You don’t even know for sure that they’re doctors. You have no evidence either way.
I bring this up because of a horrible, constant cough that I had at the end of November -- I still have it now, but I had it then also – that didn’t seem to be going away. So I decided to call a doctor, primarily because my brother’s aufruf was coming up that Shabbos, and I didn’t want to show up and cough the whole time and have everybody wonder whether they were going to make it to the wedding.
In the first place, I had to wait until Monday to call a doctor, because if you’re sick on a Sunday, you’re on your own. It’s not that important to get healed on a weekend, because who has work anyway, besides for people with writing deadlines and people who have to prepare their teaching lessons and people who just want to get better on Sunday so they can go to work on Monday?
But I had a deadline by which I wanted to feel better. So I called the doctors’ practice first thing Monday morning, and they said, “We can see you Wednesday afternoon!” which I knew meant that even if they gave me medication, I wouldn’t be better by Shabbos.
“But you can’t see your regular doctor and you can’t see them at your regular doctor building that has a hundred doctors in it. None of those doctors can see you. Your choices are a different building 20 minutes away or another building 40 minutes away,” and I said, “Um… 20 minutes away.”
I longed for the days of old when doctors made house calls, and they would show up and try to treat you with nothing but the contents of their bris milah bag and sending your spouse around the house to boil towels or whatever. Nowadays, there’s too much specialized equipment to do that, I think.
So I spent all of Monday night coughing, and Tuesday morning my wife said, “Why don’t you call Urgent Care?” which is not an idea that had occurred to me. This is why you get married -- so that when you’re not 100%, they can think of something, and then the next week when they’re sick, you can think of things largely built on the things they suggested for you the week before.
Also, I thought they just did broken bones. And COVID tests.
So I spent all of Tuesday in Urgent Care chain sucking Ricolas and trying not to cough, and sometimes failing at that, and people are looking at me like, “Why are you coughing in the same room as me? Go to the doctor! Are you trying to get everyone sick?”
They call it Urgent Care, but nothing there is urgent. Their goal is maybe to get you out by the end of the workday. You wait in the big room for like an hour, and then they have you go into a smaller room and sit on a piece of paper, which you arguably should also have been sitting on in the waiting room, and you think, “I’m finally going to be seen!” And then it’s another hour, or sometimes less, but this time with zero idea of what kind of progress they’re making getting to you. But at least there you can be free to cough with abandon. I hope they sterilized everything in that room when I left.
At some point, a nurse did come in, and he asked me about all my symptoms. I have one symptom. I can’t get through one sentence without coughing. You can hear that. Stop asking me so many questions. Questions make me cough.
And then, after another 20 minutes of waiting in the little room, the doctor swept in for about 10 seconds like she had somewhere else to be. Maybe it’s called Urgent Care because it’s urgent for her to be somewhere else. They are not calling in new patients as fast as she is moving. I’ve been out there. I don’t know what is happening in between. I think there’s like one doctor servicing all the Urgent Cares in town, driving back and forth between patients. Either that, or she has a video game paused in the other room.
She sent me into another room for chest X-rays. After that, the X-ray technician sent me back to the little room, and the doctor breezed back in and said, “You have the beginnings of pneumoniaaaa!”
“I had a feeling!” I called after her, as she disappeared down the hall. Because I’d had pneumonia before, from the end of the Siyum Hashas through about two weeks into COVID, when I also had COVID on top of it.
Anyway, the doctor prescribed an antibiotic that was supposed to kick in within 48 hours, by which we meant Thursday. For a Friday aufruf. She also prescribed a cough medicine that does absolutely nothing, but at least it tastes horrible.
So anyway, the next two days I spent taking antibiotics and wondering if they would work.
They didn’t work. I’d been misdiagnosed. I know this because I emailed my regular doctor on Friday morning.
“I don’t know what she told you,” he said. “The X-ray doesn’t show pneumonia. It’s just some virus that will go away in a few weeks. It’s going around.” In other words, they don’t know. It’s “some virus.” When Corona came around, we all gave doctors the benefit of the doubt. “They don’t know! This is a new respiratory virus!” But apparently, I just have some random contagious respiratory virus they didn’t even bother to name, and no one is concerned.
The bad thing about going to Urgent Care is that if the meds they prescribed me don’t work, I don’t get to call them and say, “Now what?” There are no follow-up questions. I will never see this doctor again. In fact, one of the things this doctor had told me was that she didn’t even normally work at that Urgent Care. I do know her name wasn’t in the email system. I’d have to spend a whole other day at Urgent Care and probably see a different doctor.
But what choice did I have? I couldn’t get an appointment with my regular doctor, who I’d specifically chosen on the basis that he happened to be in on some random day like 7 years ago when my neighbor carried me into the office so I could see someone about my back. He wasn’t afraid of catching my back problems; that he was there for. And constant blood pressure stuff since then. But when I’m coughing, it’s like, “Yeah, that’s not why I’m here. You have a virus. Get better on your own.”
But I don’t have Corona. The nurse had tested me for that before the Urgent Care doctor breezed in. And I don’t have pneumonia. I have some kind of virus (though not COVID) that apparently lasts longer than COVID and they don’t know how long it will last but they are not alarmed. As I edit this article, I am currently on week five. And it’s mutated. The cough sounds different now, and also I’m hoarse in the mornings.
And what I have now comes with constant sneezing. And sneezes make me cough. And if I cough with my mouth closed, as I try to do in crowded public situations, my nose leaks. That’s new!
But I did find, during the two days that I thought I had pneumonia, that unlike with a cough, when you tell people you have pneumonia, you get a lot of sympathy. People picture pneumonia as this disease that keeps you in bed and eventually kills you. Especially people who read a lot of old stories. Like my editors. They’re big readers, these editors.
Also, in the old days, people used to just die of a cough. Or possibly from sitting in public and trying not to cough and having their heads explode.
I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re not feeling well, don’t go to the doctor. That’s the last place you want to go. You should probably go somewhere that you’re less likely to end up worse, such as an aufruf. At least people are throwing candies.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
