The incredible shrinking wellness exam

In and out, fast

They say everything is shrinking these days due to inflation. This might explain my short, unsettling visit to the doctor recently for my annual physical, or “wellness exam,” as the health folks like to call it.

First of all, there was a scrub-wearing harbinger of doom staring me right in the face as I sat for the blood draw.

“Do you know if you have the type of veins that tend to roll?” she asked me sweetly.

I tried to think quickly over my entire history with needles of all types. “As far as I know,” I told her, “no one has ever asserted that I have roll-y veins.”

I wondered if this might be an actual medical condition and whether or not there was a cure for it. Just then, she plunged straight ahead with the needle, which glanced right off a vein that apparently had rolled.

“Well, I almost had it,” she assured me as she tried without success a few more times before scurrying over to enlist the aid of another health-care professional. The needle, meanwhile, dangled from my left arm until this new lady came over to help it gain a purchase on the stubborn vein.

They both apologized for my profuse discomfort. “It’s all good,” I said, although this was not quite true and I knew that my blue paper mask was hiding an ugly scowl.

Back I went to the doc’s inner sanctum to await his entry. No sooner had he knocked on the door and walked in than he began explaining how Tuesday had become the new Monday and that he was impossibly busy.

Workmanlike and deft, he peeked up my nose, looked in my ears, palpated my stomach, and listened to my heart and lungs. As I had no specific complaints, he concluded the exam.

I believe he might have been in there for three minutes, tops.

He then pronounced me good to go for another year and vanished as quickly as he’d appeared. But he left me much to ponder in our brief time together.

Perhaps he had missed a suspicious bump somewhere on my person or some kind of death-dealing mole? Or maybe there were rogue cells already coursing through my rollish veins that might waylay me down the road?

Back in the car, I decided to stop being such a baby about it and supposed that the doctor had been as thorough as possible in the allotted time. He was, after all, a conscientious and ethical person and I’m sure he did not want to see a pretty good customer like me befall any medical carnage.

And just maybe he actually did me a favor by not poking too far into the future of my relatively good wellness only to emerge with something scary.

After all, there is such a thing as too much info.

For example, there was the time ol’ Dizzy Dean, the great Cardinals’ pitcher, got hit in the head with a baseball and had to go to the hospital. The legendary headline in the next day’s paper read: “X-ray of Dean’s Head Reveals Nothing.”