Why I hate my foot surgeon

As you all well know by now, I'm having issues with my foot. This has meant that I have had to go to the foot surgeon a couple times. My foot surgeon is an asshole. Given my generally low tolerance for assholes, it shouldn't be surprising that I have developed a deep seated hatred for this man. However, given that he is supposedly taking care of my messed up foot, I can't quite strangle him in his office. I can, however, launch into cyber-invective, which is exactly what I'm going to do in the form of a little list titled:

Top 5 reasons I hate my foot surgeon.

#5: The Hospital. I'm used to East Baltimore, where I have walked in the Johns Hopkins ER with a broken ankle and had to wait for hours on end, because people with multiple gunshot wounds kept getting wheeled in. I almost felt guilty about having a painful appendage. Here, in wealthy suburbia, the kid in front of me had a skinned knee. A skinned freaking knee. (Presumably by kneeling in the one square foot in his 10,000 sq.ft. house that his parents neglected to cover in Persian rugs). My toe was a bloody mess barely hanging on to the rest of my foot, and I had to wait for his little jerk and his mum (who looked as if her kid would have to be amputated knee down). To be fair though, they sent him packing pretty quick. The other thing is that only way you can get to this hospital is by cab (20 bucks), and I happen to draw the really talkative guy with really bad eczema from Action Cab Co. every time. Not that I have a problem with friendly people, but he gesticulates a lot, and bits of his skin keep floating down on me. This makes for a somewhat uncomfortable cab ride.

#4: The patients. The only people in the waiting room are old people. We are talking about really old, ancient, miserable senior citizens. About a dozen of them in various stages of decay, mostly confined to wheel chairs, that make McCain look like a young stud. They're watching Judge Mathis trying to decide if one woman keyed another woman's car or not. The program is interspersed with ads about wheelchairs, medical malpractice lawyers and medications of various types, which these people watch avidly. I cannot tell you how unnerving waiting in this room is. It feels like each time someone gets called and goes in, there's only a 50% chance they'll come out alive. The room smells and feels like a mortuary. A lot of them are seeing the foot doctor to treat bed sores, so I am not going to go into a detailed visual description of the scene. I understand that none of this is their fault, so I can't be mad at them. Instead, I close my eyes for the most part, and pray that my death comes quick and painlessly.

#4b: The dude is also the foot surgeon for the local penitentiary, so on one of my visits, we had prisoners in shackles walk by, surrounded by armed posse of sheriffs. But I've already written about it here ...

#3: The nurses. When I think of nurses, I think of warm, compassionate, somewhat elderly women, who are really good at taking care of the little things that make you think of mum. Sure there's the occasional hot nurse, but I never get them. Either that or they want to have babies with the more good-looking people in the room. What does not come to mind when I think of nurses is a bad-ass biker dude, mustache, tattoos and all, who treats your toe like a rusty drive shaft. This surgeon guy has helpers from hell who bandage my toe badly enough to make it hurt for the next two days non-stop. But we do have an entertaining talk about the tattoos, so that helps numb the pain a bit.

#2: The doctor is a prima donna. He twirls about with an entourage, and generally gives you the impression that you should be licking the floor that he walks on. He also has autographed pictures all over his ofice of C-level celebrities that have had their toes fixed by him. I bet they have a seperate non-funereal waiting office and hot nurses or those people. After a 2 week wait to get an appointment with him, he spends about 12 seconds on small talk, then goes to work on the toe (see #1), tells me to continue taking care of it the way I was going to anyway, and then to come see him 3 weeks later. 12 minutes in all. I'm sure he's going to bill my ass for a whole hour. Its all a giant scam.

The #1 reason I hate my foot surgeon: The torture instrument. My second appointment, he sits at the foot of the bed with his biker-nurse at his shoulder, and pulls out this steel thing that looked like a miniature ice-cream scoop. (The handle is normally sized, but the scoop end is about 4mm x 2 mm). And then he says "This might be a little uncomfortable". I bet both of them were smiling behind their face masks. The basement scene from Pulp Fiction flashes in front of my eyes, but I tell him to go ahead. And then the rat bastard proceeds to scoop out bits of flesh/scab/tisue/congealed blood/pus from my foot. Now, my toe might have been in bad shape, but my already jangled nerves were on high alert. So the second he touched anything, pain would sear through my body, and I'd have to plead with him to stop. This would be greeted by a look of contempt and disdain, followed by a spray of a "local anesthetic" to the area. The damn thing had to be cold water, because the pain was as excruciating the next time he went at it. And the next time after that. By the 3rd or 4th go, I was in a cold sweat, shaking and biting on my palm and begging for a wooden spoon, or a shot of whiskey, something (I get nothing. Bastards). Fortunately the guy had to go see his next failed sitcom star, so after a few minutes of digging around, he stops (only for biker-nurse to wrench the toe around while trying to wrap it in seven yards of gauze).

And then they let me go. I stumble out a few minutes later and hobble off to the taxi rank. I spot a familiar Action Cab Co. car, and crutch faster and faster till I reach it, and fall gratefully, sweating, weeping, shaking, into the waiting arms of eczema-man...