That Time of the Year

Don’t most women dread that yearly GYN exam? You know the one that pokes and probes and palpates all those parts of your body that most people never see.

I actually look forward to seeing one of my favorite doctors. He is about my age, with a pony tail and clogs. Instead of alarming me, he is always reassuring, even if he finds something questionnable.

I remember once when he found a growth that had to be surgically removed, he made a wager that it was benign. If so, I owed him a batch of home-made chocolate chip cookies. I was never so happy as to bake those cookies.

Today as he came in my exam room, he took a call. After hanging up, he explained that it was one of their new doctor partners asking him to dress up as Santa Claus for a Christmas party at her house for her kids. He said, “Can you imagine a good Jewish boy like me as Santa Claus?”

Today’s conversation as he went through that checklist of the exam included the following:
– This will be the first Thanksgiving he will not have any children at home. Same for us. And a little sad.
– He gets to learn about Christmas this year because his new wife (of a year) is not Jewish. She has considered converting, but still celebrates Christmas.
– Two of his children no longer speak to him since he and their mother divorced. He misses them terribly, but after psychotherapy for the first year determined that he simply must go on without them in his life any longer.
– He grew up in a “Conservadox” household – almost Orthodox. His parents refused to let him go to dances at the local YMCA. When his baseball team (sponsored by the Y) won the championship, his parents declined to go to the awards ceremony. He went home and admitted, “I did something really bad tonight. I ate HAM.” His mother smiled. His father was furious.

At this point I realized the exam was over. I had been so engrossed in our conversation that I hadn’t even thought about all the poking and probing and palpating.

Before he left the room, he told me yet one more story about how his grandfather had changed the separate seating policy in his Orthodox synagogue by refusing to support it any longer unless he could sit with his wife. Then he was gone to write my yearly mammogram order while I got dressed.

I was sorry to be the reason he had slipped even further behind schedule, but as always I went away thinking more about what we had talked about than the procedures necessary to give me a clean bill of health.