Unmasked

I went to see my new doctor today. We sat down to go through all the medical history papers. She asked me questions about how I lost my voice and where I was when I got sick and where I'd been and what I'd been doing.

'I'm sorry. I don't want to alarm you, but I think I need to go put on a mask'.

She kept her mask on and continued asking questions. Then she disappeared for what seemed like quite a while. When she came back, she said it was probably nothing, but that I should go to the emergency room right away for all manner of tests and bloodwork and X-rays.

What was supposed to be a one-hour doctor visit somehow became a six-hour emergency room non-event. The last hour and a half of the evening was spent waiting for somebody to discuss my results with me so that I could go home. The results were in, the nurse told me; it was just a matter of waiting for a doctor to come and go over them with me. An hour and a half for a doctor to tell me that I had a run-of-the-mill flu and it was nothing to worry about.

Yes, thank you. I knew that. Ya big bunch of paranoid monkey-brains...