Dr. E's Last Stand

The doc turned out to be a bent-over antique of a man with a tidy moustache and pungent aftershave.

Dr. E was about eighty.

I asked if he needed to see a chiropractor because, I swear, his torso was bent at 45 degrees as he shuffled around.

But man, was he cool.

He had that wisdom bred from keen intelligence piled with decades of human experience.

“Back in my real life,” he told me, “I was a cardiologist. I never intended to retire.”

He left it hanging there for me to draw my own conclusion that a man bent at a 45 degree angle wasn’t fit to perform cardio-thoracic surgery for obvious reasons.

He said he’d fallen off a roof fourteen years ago, and his vertebrae from the middle of his back downward were fused together.

No chiropractic work would fix that.

But undaunted by this crippling tragedy, he found a place for himself assessing the general health of patients sent to this little psych hospital.

You didn’t just show up and check in, you had to be admitted. So that was Dr. E’s place now. He worked in the middle of the night in the middle of the week at M---, assessing the craziness of all manner of crazies.

I liked him, liked talking to him. He spoke about “the dark ages when they piped in sunlight” to the lecture halls when he was in med-school. We may have exchanged a comment about Gunsmoke; his moustache was reminiscent of Doc Adams, but his bald head was all Montgomery Burns.

He asked questions to determine the status of my vision, hearing, and olfactory senses:  “Keep your eyes on this.” He moved his pen around my face, back and forth, left and right, up and down. “Can you hear me?” he whispered. “Can you smell my aftershave?”

He asked if I knew who I am and where I was.

“My name is—“

“You don’t have to prove it to me,” he smiled. “Just say yes or no.”

He didn’t hit my knee with a hammer to check my reflexes, but he took out his hearing aids from both ears to put his stethoscope there instead. It was electronic, to amplify the sound, I guessed, to compensate for his poor hearing.

I watched him turn the dial at the joint where the ear thingies were held to the cold thingie.

His face was earnest and wizened as he listened to my heart. I could tell he took hearts seriously. He listened like he was experiencing an echo of Mozart himself at a piano.

That wet thud sploosh of muscle squeezing blood was his music-- his drug, even.

He’d dedicated years of study and a lifetime of experience to this organ that he could no longer touch, no longer hear with his own ears. He had to settle for brief, electronically enhanced refrains of that golden time, in between asking lunatics if they could smell him.

Poor old Dr. E.

I felt so much more comfortable talking to him than I felt the next morning with the psychiatrist.