I feel like when I was a kid, you had one doctor. It was a pediatrician, and he handled everything that could possibly come up. The only thing pediatricians couldn’t handle was teeth.
That was it; it was very delineated. If you had a medical issue, you weren’t like, “I’m not sure – should I show this to my pediatrician, or my dentist?”
But that is how it works as an adult; every doctor has a specialty. And the specialties kind of run into each other. There’s a skin doctor and a foot doctor and a blood doctor, and okay they specialize in different things, but which doctor do you call if you have a thing on the skin of your foot and it’s bleeding? Or do you call all 3?
What if there’s a machlokes?
I need this like I need a hole in my foot.
I actually have a hole in my foot. In both feet. They’re more like craters. The doctors are calling them ulcers, but I don’t like that term, because when I tell people I have ulcers on my feet, they say, “Alka-Seltzer!”
I’m not soaking my feet in Alka-Seltzer.
They started off small. Then I wondered, “Are they growing?” So I started taking pictures periodically, which had a nice side effect of keeping my kids from scrolling too far through the photos on my phone.
The pictures are disgusting. They’re the kind of picture that when you look at it, you close your eyes halfway to not allow the entire picture to reach your eyeballs.
My wife told me to send them to my doctor, possibly so I’d stop constantly showing them to her.
My doctor is part of this huge practice that has this medical portal that instead of coming in, you can just send them questions and then they tell you to come in. This is an incredible time saver, because they get to look up the answers before you get there, rather than making up some reason to leave the room and then looking things up, like they used to.
So I went on the portal, and I clicked “attach”, and it said, “Please refrain from uploading any photographs of a sensitive nature.”
They’re all of a sensitive nature! Why would I send my doctor pictures that are not of a sensitive nature?
“The ulcers really hurt. Here’s a picture of my face in pain.”
I bet there’s not a single picture in the entire portal that someone who’s not a doctor would ever want to look at.
Then I had to figure out which doctor to send it to. I don’t know whether this qualifies as a skin issue or a foot issue, so I figured I’d leave this choice up to my PCP. The way it works is you have a main doctor, and if you don’t know what’s wrong with you, you go to this doctor. Then he helps you decide what kind of doctor you need. His specialty is that he knows all the different types of doctors.
So my PCP looked at the pictures through half-closed eyes and told me to come in. I come in, and he says, “Here’s an antibiotic and a cream. I’m sending you to a dermatologist.”
I’m like, “You can only say that to me if I come in?”
So he pulled out a Q-tip and took a COVID test of my ankle.
The next day I go to the dermatologist, and she says, “We’re going to do a biopsy.”
A biopsy?
“We’re going to make two holes inside your existing hole.”
Two holes. Hence the bi in biopsy, I think.
“Then we’re going to leave you with vague care instructions, and we’ll call you in a couple of days, after we hear back from the lab.”
Something this dermatologist said made me think that I should call my second doctor. Yes, I have a second doctor, for some medical issue that I have yet to talk about in a humor column. I don’t tell you guys everything.
This one is a blood doctor. And it’s the worst. If you go to a foot doctor, they look at your foot. Every time you go to a blood doctor, they have to take blood. How else can they look at it? Every time. He sends me for blood tests days before I come in, and then I come in again and we talk about it.
So I contacted this hematologist through the portal, and he calls me back in a panic. And he says, “This might be a side effect of one of the medications I’ve had you on for the past 4 years.”
That was a relief, if he was right, because if this was caused by a medication, that was easily fixable.
A day later, my PCP sends me results from the swab test, which basically say, “I’m not sure what it is, but it’s bacterial, and it should respond to the antibiotic I gave you.”
Great.
Now I’m waiting on results from the biopsy.
Anyway, like 4 or 5 days later, the dermatologist sends me a results chart I can’t decipher. A few days later, she sends me more results. With zero notes.
And zero phone calls.
And in the meantime, I’m waiting for either of these doctors to say, “You know what? It’s because of this medication!”
Finally, after 10 days, they send me a result that looks a lot like what the PCP had sent me from his painless cotton-swab test after two days, wherein the PCP wrote that this was bacterial and that the antibiotic should work.
But at least there’s a consensus: The antibiotics should work.
Anyway, I finished the antibiotics, and they didn’t work.
So I sent an email to both of my regular doctors saying that I’ve finished the antibiotic, I still haven’t heard back from the dermatologist, and here’s a current picture of a sensitive nature; is this getting better or worse? Because for all I know this is how it gets better – first it looks way worse... It’s like making an omelet. I don’t want to describe the picture, but it does kind of look like an egg on the way to making an omelet.
Anyway, that day someone from the dermatologist’s office called me back – coincidentally – and said, “Okay, it’s bacterial, and you should take the antibiotic your PCP prescribed. In case you didn’t see the messages.” And I said, “Oh! Thank you! So first of all, I’m finished taking the antibiotic...”
“Then it should work!”
“Well, you can tell me if it worked... I put some pictures on the portal!”
Then there was a pause, and I heard her say, “Oh my goodness! I’ll call you back.”
I’m still waiting for her to call me back. But she did send me the same results in the actual mail days later. In case I didn’t get the phone call.
Meanwhile, my PCP writes me back – in response to the email in which I said I was still waiting to hear back from the dermatologist about whether the medication the PCP prescribed two weeks earlier should work – and said, “Should I prescribe another dermatologist?”
“Um… No?”
“We have other dermatologists. Should I refer you to Dr. Presto?”
“If Dr. Presto is actually magic, then maybe.”
Then the hematologist calls me and says, “Number one, we have to put you on more antibiotics. Number 2, have you seen a podiatrist?”
“Recently or ever?”
“Do you have a podiatrist?”
“Not as part of your practice.”
For this, I wanted someone who was part of the practice. I like the idea that I have a team of doctors, and they could all put their heads together and trip over each other and apparently not communicate at all or work as a team but at least when I put pictures on the portal, anyone can see them.
So I went to the podiatrist, and he said, “I don’t know what this is, but here’s a prescription for a cream that costs $300.”
And everyone asks, “Wasn’t it covered by insurance?”
It is. It’s normally $900.
“Wow! What does it do?”
It cleans things up so it no longer looks as much like an egg.
I actually forgot to bring band-aids to wrap up afterward, but I figured, “It’s a doctor’s office. He probably has band-aids.”
He did not. Instead, he had the nurse wrap me in 85 feet of gauze tape so my feet no longer fit into my slippers. And it was the new, fancy kind of tape that sticks to itself. And also to the floor of the office. And the gas pedal of my car.
The other thing he did was send me to a wound-care specialist.
Yes, apparently this is a specialty. So the other doctors can say, “What do you think we are? We don’t know how to deal with wounds!”
Clearly. You gave me 85 feet of gauze.
But yeah, let’s loop a 5th doctor in on this. Who isn’t part of this practice.
It’s in a hospital.
Why does this huge practice that has 12 doctors for me alone not have a wound care department?
Then I come home, and my son asks, “Why don’t you just go to the best doctors?”
“Because we’re not living in a Pirchei story! You think I could just Google, “Best doctors”? And they’ll see me?
But I mean at least a doctor who doesn’t put tape on your feet that sticks to his floors.
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.