Murder, Syphilis, Piggostat

So, after lying around listlessly since Saturday afternoon, I decided to go to the doctor, where I learned all sorts of interesting things.

I have no idea whether my doctor is actually any good, but he makes me laugh - and there's something to be said for that. And he chats. A few years ago, it came up in conversation that his wife was a reproductive endocrinologist and had worked at RMA in New Jersey. This was shortly after the murder scandal where an RMA nurse had her husband cut up and tossed in the Chesapeake so she could run away with her lover, an RMA doctor. So, you know me, on the way out I asked him if his wife knew them. He looked at me wide-eyed, closed the door, and proceeded to tell me that his wife had joined the practice after the doctor left with his tail between his legs, so no, she didn't know them, BUT, that she was thoroughly skeeved out to learn that the doctor had been having it on with the nurse on what was now her desk.

Today, he felt the lymph nodes in my neck and then in my elbows. Elbows! I've never had anyone feel my elbows before. He said that enlarged lymph nodes in the elbows could be a sign of untreated syphilis and launched into a possibly apocryphal story he'd learned in med school about a doctor who always shook his daughter's boyfriends hands with his left hand on the boy's right elbow.

Then he listened to my lungs, decreed them "junky" and sent me downstairs for an x-ray.

Have you ever noticed those 19th-century-looking restraining devices that they use to immobilize little kids who need x-rays? There's always one parked in the hall at our doctor's office, and I wonder at them every time. Well, this time, I was in luck - there was a photocopied sign taped to the wall in the x-ray room - it's a PIGGOSTAT. Can you believe that? What a wonderful word.

I told my doctor about the Piggostat when I went back upstairs for the verdict. He was non-plussed, and didn't quite understand why I was so tickled about the Piggostat. Oh and the verdict? PNEUMONIA. Can you believe that? I can't, though I feel less guilty for being out of work for the third day in a row, and maybe tomorrow too.

I'm on antibiotics for a week (which "cost" $234 for seven pills), and I have to go back in a month for another x-ray. On my way out, my doctor told me that he'd tell them to use the Piggostat on me for the repeat x-ray. I told him that the thing was only for kids under 3 1/2; he said "you read that sign?"

Hey. I always read the signs. If I hadn't read the sign, I wouldn't have learned anything about the Piggostat.