I Fired My Doctors

My gastroenterologist with the pervy office, my flighty psychiatrist, my chatty dental hygienist. Over the course of one year, I chucked them all.

Hi happy people, confused people, questioning people, celebrating people, bored people, ecstatic people, angry people, excitable people, and a special hello to people who will vacillate between two or more of these states while reading this intro: I get you!

I am a little obsessed with this story from Lizzie today. I love her writing. Plus it brings up so many bizarre or horrid doctor experiences of my own (an unnecessary organ removal, a dentist who made me dance a waltz with him while he was waiting for the anesthesia to kick in and then drilled the wrong tooth). So many that I originally asked her if we could consider running it in the Unpopular Opinion section with the helpful headline: Fire All Your Doctors. She wisely rejected that idea.

On another note: I am overjoyed at the amazingly inspired and unique responses to my call for a new AJPT Beauty Editor last week! I seriously have multiple winners already. So here is your last chance to write me (jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com once again) nominating yourself or someone else, because this coming week, I am announcing the big winner!

(That reminds me: Another feature coming up this week on AJPT is Rain Phoenix’s debut advice column in which she helps a troubled reader with a super tricky dilemma. I can’t wait for you to see this.)

Ok, I want so bad to start unleashing all my reactions to Lizzie’s story here right now. But I will let you catch up with me by reading it too and then I will get into it in the comments. I hope you will do the same. See you there! Thanks Lizzie!! Thank you all, my favorite emotional beings!

Xox Jane

By Lizzie Simon

It started with my gastroenterologist. I realized I was delaying and delaying and delaying getting the colonoscopy I was due for because I didn’t want him to do it. He was fine. Sort of. This is not how you should feel about your doctors and definitely not how you should feel about your gastroenterologist.

You should feel like, hell yeah, that doc is on MY team, which is how I feel about my current gastroenterologist, who pays deep attention to everything happening in my innards, takes me in as a whole person and easily relates to me as a working mother. “I’ve been to a lot of scary hoods in my lifetime,” she said to me during our last visit, “but the scariest hood is adulthood.” Too true.

“In a new office that was no longer rape-y, he was always rushed and kind of in a lousy mood.”

My former gastroenterologist and I? We’d been through a lot. The very first time I went to see him, I was taken aback by a wall of terrible art in the lobby, terrible art that included amateurish nude drawings of very young women.

There was also a framed photograph of Donald Trump arm in arm with a different doctor who used the offices (Harold Bornstein, who famously told the press that he had thoroughly examined Trump and that he would be the healthiest individual ever elected).

I told my gastroenterologist that his lobby was pervy and abominable - and he said he’d had no idea, he’d always used a different entrance than the patient entrance, that he was “mortified.” I asked him if he was a feminist. He stammered, then said yes, and said he would immediately look into renting someplace new.