Last week I went to my family doctor for the first time in a decade. After moving to Kitchener I just never bothered to take myself off her roster. Every once in a while something would happen to remind me that I was still registered with her, such as when I got my COVID vaccinations. The person screening me would ask me if I had a family doctor, and I'd always have to think for a bit before being like, "Actually, yeah".
At one point I decided that I should try to find a family doctor in Kitchener, but the system said it couldn't register me with someone new because I was already with someone. I kind of chickened out of unregistering with her because it's so hard to find a family doctor nowadays that I didn't want to give one up if I wasn't sure I could get a new one, even if the one I was with was in a different city.
I was surprised that she remembered who I was, although she told me that she didn't remember me with a beard. I told her that she likely would have seen me with it once, after I came back from Canada World Youth.
This turned out to be the case, because she looked up the record of my last visit with notes about what to follow up on. Last I'd talked to her she had recommended me to see a dermatologist about some multiplying, scaly red lesions that had manifested around my left ankle during my time abroad.
Back then, I was fresh out of Mali. I'd gotten an email from Canada World Youth saying that someone in my group had contracted cutaneous leishmaniasis, and that we should all get checked ASAP. I looked up the symptoms for the condition and it looked like what I had.
In the email they said they couldn't disclose the identity of the person who had been diagnosed with it, but I knew someone that had these symptoms as well, so I sent him a message. I asked him if he was the one that had gotten the diagnosis, and he said that he was and that I should get checked.
So I went to my doctor (and this was the last time I would see her until now). She took a skin sample and recommended me to this dermatologist. But the guy canceled on me twice, pushing me way past the time limit that CWY suggested I get checked. When I finally did see him, he said that whatever I'd contracted, my body had fought it off before I'd seen him.
I told him "I think it might have been cutaneous leishmaniasis" and he shot me a dirty look. I know that medical professionals don't like it when patients play Dr. Google, and a 21 year old kid putting forward such an unusual diagnosis probably made me look like a hypochondriac. So I quickly told him that the reason I believed this was because I had been living in a village in West Africa, and someone else with the same symptoms had received this diagnosis. He just scoffed and chastised me for using such simple logic, telling me that just because someone else had something, didn't mean I had the same thing.
So now, coming back to the present, I'm sitting in my family doctor's office and she wants to go over the notes of this dermatologist. She reads them out loud, and the guy said he suspected I might have contracted cutaneous leishmaniasis from an insect bite in Mali!
So he made fun of me for putting forward that idea, and then he wrote it down as his own thought! I mean come on, I'm not a scholarly article, you don't have to cite me, but the fact that he would dismiss my thoughts verbally and claim them as his own kind of stinks.
It felt like a joke that took ten years to tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment