Benny Jay: Gimme Some Pills, Doc!

February 3rd, 2010

For the past six weeks, I have this cold.

It comes. It goes. It comes back again – yellow gunk in my eyes, green crusty stuff in my nose. Disgusting….

“You gotta see a doctor,” my wife tells me.

“It’s a cold,” I tell her. “What’s a doctor gonna do?”

“Give you some antibiotics….”

“They don’t give you antibiotics for a cold – you gotta have an infection….”

“Sometimes you have an infection and you don’t know it….”

She tells me this incredible story about our younger daughter who had a cold for weeks, She went to the doctor. The doctor looked in her nose and ear and couldn’t find an infection. My wife insisted – sometimes you have an infection that can’t be detected. The doctor gave in and prescribed some pills. My daughter took the pills. And guess what — the cold went away!

“So you see, sometimes you can have an infection that can’t be detected….”

“That’s the dumbest story I’ve ever heard,” I say.

“It’s true,” she says.

Fast forward to the weekend. My wife and I are watching Surrogates, this incredibly idiotic Bruce Willis movie. I’m hacking, wheezing, sneezing. Every now and then I drift off and when I come back I see Bruce Willis walking around in this incredibly hokey blond wig.

“I’m hallucinating,” I tell my wife.

“Told you – you gotta see a doctor.”

I go to bed. I wake up. My nose and eyes are crusted. “That’s it,” I tell my wife. “I’m going to the doctor.”

Only it’s Sunday and the doctor’s office is closed.

So I go to the mini clinic at the drug store, where there are so many people waiting to be examined that they’ve taken all the chairs. I sit on the floor near the rack of cheesy plastic toys.

I fade in, I fade out. I hear my name being called. I look up. I see the doctor.

She’s young. Maybe thirty. She’s wearing a white jacket and has a stethoscope around her neck. She leads me into a room and closes the door.

“I’m sick, doctor,” I moan.

“I’m not a doctor,” she says. “I’m a nurse practitioner.”

“Oh….”

Pause.

“Do you want to see a real doctor?” she asks.

“Can you write prescriptions?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

“No problem. I need some antibiotics.”

She looks at me grimly. I can tell she hates me. “Sir, I can’t just prescribe antibiotics.”

I tell her the whole story: Six weeks of yellow gunk in my eyes and green crusty stuff in my nose….

“It could be a cold,” she says.

“For six weeks, doctor?”

“I’m not a doctor….”

I look at her. She looks at me. Now I know – she really hates me.

She measures my temperature, blood pressure, pulse. She puts this weird clamp-like thingamajig on my finger – not sure what that does.

She looks up my nose, in my ear and down my mouth. Then she says: “No infection.”

“Does that mean you’re not going to prescribe some pills?” I ask.

“I can’t prescribe pills without an infection….”

“But my wife says sometimes you have infections you can’t see….”

“Is your wife a doctor?”

“No, but.” I tell her the whole story about my daughter and the doctor.

I can tell she’s thinking: This guy’s an idiot!

She says: “Sir, I can’t give you an antibiotic unless there’s an infection for it to attack….”

I stumble out. Stagger home. Flop on the couch. Start watching a DVD of Weeds. That’s the TV show about this housewife in California who sells marijuana. It’s been on for – I don’t know – a bunch of years. Only I just discovered it. I’m always a little behind on these things. And now I can’t stop watching. I’ve watched the first three seasons – we’re talking about thirty shows – in less than a week.

I wonder: Can watching too much TV make you sick?

I hack. Cough. Wheeze.

“Here,” says my wife. “Have some chicken soup.”

At least I don’t need a prescription for this….