Tony Deyal LAST SATURDAY night, after a heavy Indian meal, I found that I had a hard time sleeping. I could have tried the foolproof insomnia cure of a doctor I know. "Sit on the very edge of the bed," he suggested, "and you are sure to drop off."
I fell asleep and on Sunday morning woke up dizzy, the room spinning or my head or both. This feeling continued until, having enough of it and my wife afraid of what it might mean, I decided to go to a private clinic as a walk-in patient. If death is a crossing, this was even worse. It was a cross crossing indeed.
"Are you the emergency case?" an attendant asked me as I entered the clinic. "No," I said, "I am not an emergency. I wanted to see a doctor." The receptionist to whom I had spoken on the phone came in with the same question, "Are you Mr. Deyal the emergency case?" I went into my spiel again about feeling dizzy and wanting to see a doctor.
The nurse made me lie down. I felt like the little girl who complained to her mother, "A boy in my class asked me to play doctor." The concerned mother replied, "Oh, dear! What happened, honey?" "Nothing," the little girl said. "He made me wait 45 minutes and then overcharged the insurance company."
CASTRO AND GASTRO
I didn't have to wait that long. An Indian doctor came. Even as he approached me I knew that I should have gone to a Cuban doctor who at least would know the difference between Castro and gastro. In the meantime, the nurse had taken my blood pressure which was highish but not sufficient to make me dizzy.
The doctor deliberated. My pulse was good. Perhaps it was diabetes, something I don't have and don't want. Another doctor came in and they both started to talk about another patient. I felt like the person who told his psychiatrist his problem. "People ignore me," he complained. "Next," said the psychiatrist. Or when the Invisible Man asked for an appointment. "Tell him I can't see him," the doctor said.
Having exhausted the possibilities of the medical standbys of blood pressure and diabetes, the Doctor then checked me exhaustively with his stethoscope. I took big breaths and laughed as I did so, remembering the young lady with the lisp who when asked to do the same thing by a doctor took it as a compliment. "Yeth," she replied proudly, "and I'm only thix-teen." Me, I am not so much old and bent as old and broke.
The doctor then advised an ECG (Electro Cardiogram) and they wired me to a machine. My poor anxious wife, eyes widening as they got the little suckers onto my chest and other parts, was extremely worried. In the meantime, I lay there waiting.
Perhaps because there was nothing to read and nothing to do but lie there, I remembered an awful doctor joke. The patient says to the doctor, "My tongue tingles when I touch it to a cracked walnut wrapped in used toaster oven aluminium foil, what's wrong with me?" The doctor responds, "You have far too much free time." Little spiky graph comes out of the machine. There was nothing to worry about. Not heart. I had one in the right place with the right, even though Jamaican, beat. Dub, dub, dub, dub, dub.
So what was it? Dizziness. Perhaps viral, the doctor said. In the meantime I was like the little boy who swallowed the hundred dollar bill. When asked by the doctor what the boy's condition was, the nurse replied, "No change as yet." That was me. Temporarily. Then they added up the bill. Four hundred and sixty dollars.
Had they taken my blood pressure then I am certain they would have found grounds to hospitalise, sedate or even straight-jacket me. No wonder they were all smiling, I thought. I must have paid their wages and mortgage for them. Instead of diminishing my dizziness increased. My heart started pounding furiously. Lucky I wasn't wired in at the time otherwise they would have needed legal size paper instead of the little adding machine roll. What a way to go, I thought, still dizzy and still without a solution.
The doctor gave me a prescription for eighty dollars worth of medicine for dizziness. Five hundred and forty dollars in all and I was still dizzy. In fact, just thinking of it now, several days later and my blood pressure rises like the temperature over the past week.
However, I can't remain angry forever. Surely, there must be a joke, after all laughter is still the best medicine. And there is. The poor sick patient says to the doctor, "What I need is something to stir me up, something to put me in a fighting mood. Did you put something like that in this prescription?" And the doctor replies, "No need for that. You will find that in your bill."
Tony Deyal was last seen going to Cuba to help Castro with a dietary problem. It seemed he had problems eating or drinking, some kind of obstruction. "Hmm," he said, "maybe you ought to take that cigar out of your mouth."
