Appointments with a doctor always make me nervous. Even when they are routine checkups, like the most recent one, my anxiety mounts with arrival at the clinic.
On this occasion my blood pressure has shot up to new heights, with the diastolic figure (the lower one) breaking the hundred barrier for the first time ever. “White coat syndrome,” they call it, but they could be wearing purple and it would still happen.
Why such anxiety? It’s elemental, irrational, based, I suspect, on fear of them finding something dire, an unknown lethal enemy lurking within my organs that will sooner or later do me in.
I always had fantasized that by this advanced age of mid-seventies, a kind of statute of limitations would have taken hold. This concept I imagined as working to quiet anxiety with arguments such as this: “You have lived longer than 95 percent of human beings in the history of the world, so why should you complain about the prospect of your life coming to an end?” But rationalizations like this never work.
Other professionals at the clinic, as they record my weight and height, undoubtedly see me as just another 73-year-old male but my primary care physician knows better, recognizing me as a unique, not to say peculiar, person.
By now, she has attended to my health for some fifteen years and we enjoy an excellent working relationship. Long on a first-name basis, we show patience with one another: I did not even mind her being a half-hour late for this appointment and she, for her part, puts up with my chatter.
She inquires for my daughter, as I do for her son. She also asks if I am still writing and gently wonders how my wife’s recent retirement has affected our household.
All of this conversation much pleases me, not only for itself, but because I place greater confidence in physicians who know the whole person rather than just the physique. Perhaps she is helping me, even at this late stage, develop a greater appreciation of my bodily self.
Body image tends still to be a problem for me, though much less as I age. The injury to my left arm suffered at birth does not loom nearly so large in advanced years as it used to in adolescence and young adulthood. Growing older has its rewards, after all.
After finishing her top-to-bottom examination of me, my doctor tells me something I have never before heard from her: “You seem younger than your age.” These words refer not to an immaturity she has observed in me, I hope, but rather correspond to my own image of myself as a person gifted with unusually good health and a buoyant appreciation for life.
But still, the doctor prescribes a pill for blood pressure control. Because of a bias against medication, I feel reluctant to take anything, unless absolutely necessary. In this instance I will go along with her prescription, at least till the next appointment.
She also wants me to undergo a test, one that strikes me as especially nasty. Probably, I will resist doing it for a while, without telling her, and then, after summoning up the courage, submit to the unavoidable. Being a devout coward when it comes to medical procedures, I have to steel my soul each time.
Routine blood tests, also ordered by my doctor, will pose no problem for me so long as I can have Joe, a veteran technician, do them. He is marvelously skilled at finding small veins without poking around, probing for them the way physicians and others are wont to do. This friendly, beneficent Dracula makes of the bloodletting no ordeal at all.
Had this visit been anything other than a routine check-up, I probably would have asked my wife to come with me. It’s not just that she would be a strong advocate, if I needed one, but she would be there for me in other ways as well. Her emotional support might make all the difference were a dire diagnosis to emerge.
Even a routine medical exam makes us confront ourselves as body. Inevitably, you reveal yourself as you really are, at least as far as can be seen and measured.
There is undeniably something humiliating about it, even when the physician is thoroughly discreet and sympathetic. We are confronted with our bodily self in all its ridiculousness and vulnerability.
Even though this latest check-up was quite upbeat, I do not feel complacent about my health. “The center does not hold,” the poet Yeats said in a different context, but the statement applies here too. I await the inevitable next crisis with a mixture of resignation and hope.
And, always, the question of identity lurks just offstage. Who am I, this embodied ego? How can my spirit be so intertwined with this physical structure?
Richard Griffin