Wide Ankle

Where all a doctor travels with your strain

Thousands of doctors work long and hugely demanding hours and they are truly honoured. But also, they are now being challenged by a new tribe of medics who follow the unholy trinity…MRI, CT Scan and X-ray.

So I fetch up at this clinic with this pain in the foot, wait the mandatory half hour after the appointment time, an acceptable delay, not sloppiness. When we were kids, things were so different. Your dad would usher in doc into your home, carrying his triangular bag for him. Doc would take your pulse, check your tongue and give you an APC powder and say nothing to worry about. That was that. Now, they want you to worry, that is how they can reach their quota. This lot pads up more than cricketers.

Finally, it is my turn. No bedside manners. Doc puts on his custard yellow rubber gloves and presses the sore point. I say ‘ouch’. He says we should do an X-ray, which seems like a reasonable step in going forward, though 50 years ago the doc would have said, if a bone was broken you wouldn’t be walking, here, buzz off, take a painkiller and rest it.

Now this guy isn’t happy with X-ray, he blithely suggests a blood breakdown called a CBC to check for an infection. Like all of the human race I am also a moth in the light helpless about the logic of the orders he is giving. Medical science stuns you into submission. You go along with the flow. Then he says, you are walking funny. Sprain your ankle and see how you walk buddy.

He says we should have an MRI. What is this ‘we’ thing? Whatever for? It’s a sprained ankle not Armageddon.

He proceeds to write the name of another clinic, which his friend runs and he says I will tell him you are coming today. He is a very nice guy (who will charge me double). I marshal my sharpest sarcy retort since we are unlikely to ever be friends and say, why not do an ECG while we are at it, like no stone unturned. He perks up and says, not a bad idea, always a good thing to rule things out.

That’s what this tribe is so adept at. Ruling things out except that it is you, the patient, who is jumping through coloured hoops. Talk about the sprained ankle getting a raw deal. Besides a bit part in the opening scene it’s nowhere in the script. That is what we came for…certainly not an iron deficiency test.