DAILY DIARY: Yesturday, Setting Broken Bones

I know a lot of doctors in Oman. I spend a lot of time around doctors. As a result, I always tell my friends, "Never marry a {medical} doctor." All my friends who ignored me, are divorced now. I'd say I told you so, but maybe that is a bit mean, given what they went through?

Don't get me wrong, I find doctors to be funny, engaging, intelligent (some of them), and quirky people. I like quirky people. I enjoy observing the different personalities in a hospital and how they interact and deal with others.

But there just isn't something entirely right usually in someone who decides to become a doctor. I'm okay with nurses, generally.

For example, yesturday. You'd be surprised how many people wanted a turn at setting my bone.

To enjoy cracking someone's bone into place, or to be excited by it, is something 100% strange to me. I've done this before, out of need. Didn't enjoy it one bit, and from that experience, didn't really want to set my own injury.

I avoided going to the hospital because I know everyone there. Doctors get perversely excited over traumas. Cut off limbs, cruel dislocations... Being a test of their skills I guess.

Doesn't make me like them or admire them less, understand, I just find something oddly inhuman about them. Not in a bad way, but in a way I can't relate to myself.

It was like, that time I met the doctor who delivered my daughter, who I threw a tea cup at, and swore at, calling her useless, and had to sit beside her for a three day conference.

Awkward.

But incompetance of the extreme led me to having to go there for paperwork anyways, and they caught one sight of me, and that was it.

To that one woman at the reception. "No, I am not going to go back there. It is hot out, I walked here already with a broken bone, as you can see, and that's far."

"So just ask one of the doctors you know to write you one, that's closer," she told me.

Ugh.

Weird having people you work with or know professionally touch your body. Weird having them know every nuance of your medical history.

They remember my allergies, if my relatives forget. Which I find strange, but I suppose is all and well for the health system. After a day of about minus -70 for Oman's health system, I'd give that to be +40 on my scale of rating hospital competance.

Of course, the awesome part of knowing doctors personally is, you can ask them for medical advice when they are off duty by phone.

But let me tell you why that is not so awesome.

It is not so awesome, because then you owe them. Yeah.

Oweing them means trusting them.

I usually don't trust the medical opinions of doctors in Oman, as a rule. The first doctor I meet is usually wrong, or looses a test result, or something.

But as a result of coming there, I asked the doctor I knew least to make me the required paperwork, and while I was waiting for him, I ran into another doctor that I knew. And owed.

As a result, he took me into the training room, and while asking me a rather odd question that gave his intent immediately away, he cracked my bone into place.

I screamed.

I know, I am a baby.

The worst thing about knowing medical people is you see a lot of stuff. So then, complaining or whining about a mere broken bone seems petty, when, say, there's that car accident victim over there bleeeding out, that woman in horrible, ceaseless pain to the left, and the amputated trauma.

A broken bone not jetting out of the flesh, even at a wickedly odd angle, seems, so small and mundane.

I don't know about you, but I don't really like other people knowing what my last words would be if I were going to be stabbed to death, or what kind of obcenities, pathetic or gross, I mutter when I am in pain.

Now he knows. We'll work together, and I find other people knowing that to be beyond bizarre.

Of course, he also now knows, my feet are sweaty. My feet sweat when I walk across a parking lot in Oman in the middle of the afternoon. Forgive me, it's hot.

Besides commenting on that, he didn't set it all the way.

In come the medical students. Have to say yes to them. This time they freeze it. I call them a bunch of mosquitoes, which probably makes no sense to them. That's me trying not to kick a nurse or swear.

The doctor I did not know well, but whose name I now know, sets it finally.

All this began with me taking a day off from work to make a cup of tea and write for work. I am a klutz, and now my Omani husband is telling me everytime I walk anywhere "there is a raised tile!", or "a corner--watch out!". It is driving me insane and I think I might actually kill him if he doesn't shut up.

No, I will not wear steel-toe work boots while doing dishes in the kitchen. Ugh.

{day ends---alhamdulilah}

My God that was long.