I remember sitting in the brightly lit waiting room of the local general practitioner. I had been frequenting this surgery since I was a young child. Probably all my life I had seen the old big nosed Greek “Doc Dewani”, aside a few desperate attempts for second opinions when I was diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety. Typical really, I was one hundred percent certain it was lung cancer. The walls have been painted recently and a young Asian man has taken over as head practitioner. Dewani moved on, and when I was struggling for a repeat prescription of Xanax I even gave him a call once. He was welcoming and stern, he didn’t give me the repeat and told me to be careful, he rang the next day but I never called back. There are still the Disney pictures of Baloo from The Jungle Book on the wall, and a straw case full of Tonka trucks and plush animals, tables with Reader's Digest and Woman’s Day. The station on the radio is always magic 1950's music, the good times, or pensioner talk back radio. The lady at the reception knows me and she smiles as she mops water trudged though by people's feet, marked with the petering rain outside.
This visit is about excessive urination.
I probably piss about 6 to 10 times a day, even more when I'm drunk, which is a regular occurrence. Well, to be brutally honest, the excessive urination is a section in a self demanded entire check for disease. Like my fifth opinion.
Urine tests for diabetes, blood tests for anaemia and tuberculosis, piss tests for prostate, chest x-rays for emphysema, and ultra sounds on my bladder. I’m pretty sure everything, but the bladder test, will come back as symptomatic anxiety, but it’s worth knowing for sure (again).
I leaf through a magazine, beside three or four locals. Children in school uniforms, mothers holding the hands of their red-faced sons. The door of the consultation room opens and shuts, walking in sick and returning with hope of health or another specialist appointment.
The small, yellow, round-shaped face of Dr Lee pops around the corner and he mumbles, almost inaudibly, my name. His office is familiar and he has the X-rays and results of my entire test.
“Slight prominence of the retrosternal air space. No pneumonic consolidation or collapse. Hilar regions and costophrenic angles are within normal limits.” —Anxiety.
“Bladder conclusion—Large post micturition urinary bladder residue. Slightly heterogeneous prostate texture.”
He mumbles with his words, this poor bastard. I can imagine him working like a fiend in college. His parents maybe owning a milk bar and his old man breaking his back for a extra hundred or so a week at a market some place downtown. I’m not saying this is fact, I’m just elaborating on a nonfiction story of experience, not being an Uncle Tom. He knows his shit, gives me an asthma puffer and recommends me to urologist. He makes sure to mention that if I wait for the Medicare operated consultation, I would be waiting months. His clinic is Medicare accepted. He gives me the name of a private clinic in a trendy part of town.
Looks at me with great concern when he says it could “cost a frew hundred dolla.”
I shake his soft, fleshy white hand and thank him profusely. My appointment is scheduled for next week.
I am almost prepared for anything as I approach the suite. It’s something I want fixed and I’m ready to drag my poor cock through the muddy waters of Hades. The building is huge and a share an elevator to the first floor with a slit-eyed man and his old-aged carer. He is in a wheelchair, with a pocket watch, ticking away quickly, in his hands. A crazed Muslim kid with round Elton john glasses screams and runs furiously down the hall, banging on chairs with his fists. Mr Chaimberland's office is cornered by the gynaecologist. So I take my place with the pregnant mums and ovarian cancer patients, like the proverbial sore appendage. Sequentially a loud male voice would boom from around the corner, and an old man holding his groin would stand up, and another would duck waddle out. The receptionist’s sweet voice behind chattering on a phone. When my name is belted I meet a fat burly man, wrapped in a pink shirt, leaning out of a door, like Kramer in "Seinfeld." He shakes my hand with a preppy grip and introduces himself.
He sits at a wide, oak and lacquered, gold-trimmed table, a triangle length with his name neatly embossed across its front. He asks me a few questions, to be answered “in my own words” and scuttles through paper with a disconcerting contempt. After a quick q and a he pulls pack a curtain, with a white bed behind. I’m asked to lie above, but first I have to remove my dirty shoes. His fat face pushes words out, instead of speaking. I get on the bed and pull down my pants, as instructed. I cup my cock in my hand; hold it with a flat palm against my stomach.
Nonchalantly he says “show me your penis”, as I move my hands he picks it up and flops it around a bit, he tells me to pull back the head and open the eye. With a thumb and a shaky finger I pull open my knob and he looks down, “that’s fine” he says, looking at the tattoo on my stomach. It says checkmate, written in italic script, faded blacks that have washed almost green.
“Checkmate, isn’t that a brand of condoms? I bet the girls love that,” he says, slapping on a pair of latex gloves, that send out a cloud of talc as they snap in place. Sterile and safe. I hear a commotion outside, and Dr Chaimberland pokes his head out the angle of the door and tells a man to sit down. He explains that he is fitting me in while the grumpy old man went to the toilet to deliver a sample. When he swaggers back for me, the look in his eyes says it all. “Now have you ever had a prostate check Ben?”
Reeling through a list why he has to do check, even at my age of 24, something about the aforementioned heterogeneous texture of my prostate. It’s a horrible, uneasy feeling of sickness, fear and fury. “Please pull your pants down and bend over, mister smith.”
Like he’s ordering a fucking cup of coffee, or asking me to park his car, anything aside show me your asshole. My hands are spread on the blue sheet but I can’t make my body bend, it’s a physical impossibility, mind and body dualism. I’m sure he’s seen this prudence all his years at the helm, so he puts a hand on my upper back and gently pushes forward. “Don’t worry; I’m not taking your virginity.” I want to punch this guy in the fucking face, but I’m skewered and words often fail you when a digits up your ass.
All I can do I grit my teeth and bear it.
When it’s over he makes me use a tap in the corner of the room to demonstrate the strength of my urine flow. This is the easy part, like a kid making a science experiment. Then he tells me the compulsive pissing is an affirmation of my mind, that I have trained my bladder to shrink. Even makes a relation to the good old boys at the pub, and how they can some times urinate up to a litre of beer-rine, I measure a measly 650mls. That’s his prognosis, plus I got to measure and time my piss for 2 whole days. Carry a piss covered tub around and a sweaty sheet of paper.
Outside his office he shakes my hand and yells another name down the hallway. He looks at the two ladies behind the counter and picks up a sheet of paper. He says a date for my re-assessment, and I shuffle my appointment sheets into my X-ray package.
“Could you believe how much a wedding can cost!” he slaps at the paper, shaking his head, coaxing me to ask, and baiting me with his desire for ego soothing. “Have you girls seen this? Seen how much it cost?” He must have had the fax sent to his office to ensure his reception could see it.
“You’re using the wrong caterer — (mindless rabble about food and guests)” the hens at the computers cluck. Finishing with “we are still waiting for our invites.”
I pay a few hundred on my credit card and start down the hall.
Scuttling down the hall to the lifts.
Vaseline wetting my boxers.
I feel raped, not by old man urologist.
But by pretty much everything else.
tom - 2008-10-27 04:27:14
good one doctor angst, thumbs up.
noof - 2008-10-28 02:27:03
Nice job Ben!
Ralph Mandick - 2009-04-12 21:03:39
Ben John Smith is alternative reel's worst addition of all time. PLEASE, no more crappy short stories and poems, its killin' the atmosphere.
[Editor's Note: Actually, Ben John Smith has received overwhelmingly positive reviews since he started writing for Alternative Reel. We welcome all of his contributions to the site!]
Ben Smith - 2009-04-17 03:13:15
your right. Fuck it.
Anonymous - 2009-05-13 22:54:44
Ben is clearly a very talented individual, with an engaging writing style. Fuck the haters, what do they know about writing articles that surpass this in terms of overall standard? They only know best how to incite people with their contemptible bullshit, and how to stir it vigorously - until everyone's got a whiff.