A Visit with my Therapist and other Doctors

"Old age is, so to speak, the sanctuary of ills: they all take refuge in it." Antiphanes

I read in a tongue-in-cheek editorial that: "Aging is like weight gain, it creeps up on you." Getting older is not analogous to gaining weight, because you can always lose weight! Age adds complications like a tree adds rings. The distant past seems recent until you do the math.  But I find the aging process to be fascinating in spite of the aches, pains, and more invasive and humiliating doctor's visits. After having my hips replaced I've felt younger, walked more upright, I'm less bow-legged, and I'm about an inch taller. The surgery and my recovery process was interesting but not nearly as interesting as what seems to have followed, the strange side effects, presumably from the anesthesia.

A Visit to My Therapist
"Sometimes, it seems like I can smell a wet campfire," I said. "You know that smell just after you pour water on a camp fire?"
My therapist looked at me warily. I think he had been wondering about me since I had the bout of temporary amnesia, just after my hip surgery. I exacerbated his unease when I jokingly asked  if all DSM manuals had cameras in the book spine. Now he makes sure I'm not between him and the office door.
"Where are you when it happens?"
"In the car, at a restaurant, the gym, even comes on when I'm laying awake in the middle of the night," I said.
"Have you been taking your meds?"
"Sure," I said. "Do you think I'm hallucinating?"
"You mean an olfactory hallucination?"
"And I've had a raspy throat and last week I had an inflamed larynx," I said.

He rubbed his eyes. My therapist looked like had aged in the hour we shared.  He suggested that I might want to see an ear,throat, nose specialist. I didn't tell my therapist that I already had an appointment, that I had been on-line looking up the symptoms for throat cancer, that in the night when I have my nightly anxiety attack, I was worried. And I didn't, nor would I ever, ask him who do therapist go see? Is is like in Lord of the Rings where a common wizard reports to a mid-level wizard, who then reports, presumable, to a higher authority?

Doctors must take a class in how to engage the patient in innocuous conversation while they tap, squeeze, look into various body openings, and collect samples of stools, urine, blood, spit, and other fluids and secretions.  It's an art form. "How do you stay fit?" the E/N/T doctor said. He was holding my nose open with what looked like Captain Hook's hook and peering into my nostril like a spelunker mapping a cave route.

I told him I rode a bicycle every chance I got. And I told him that I've been spinning two and three times a week plus my regular work out at my gym. "That's interesting," he said while he was greasing a fiber optic device and testing its focus.
I'm curious, I like learning something new every day. But even though the device was only about two or three millimeters in diameter it was making me uneasy.
"What's that for?" I asked pointing at the small tube.
He held my nostril open with the hook and squirted something into my nose that smelled and tasted like lizard bile.
"I'm going to run it into your nose and take a look at the inside of your larynx. Oh, I forgot to tell you that the spray smells and tastes awful. But it should numb everything all the way into your throat. Tilt your head back."he said.
It didn't hurt and was only a bit uncomfortable but it felt weird twisting around looking at the inside of my larynx.
I have acid reflux he told me. I'd had it for some time and it had caused some irritation of the larynx.
"Especially at night," he said. "It leaks out of your stomach and works its way up the esophagus."
"So, I don't have cancer?"
He told me that "we" would look down my throat again in three months to make sure. Then we talked about bicycles. He asked about my road trip last summer, where I started, how far I had ridden, was I by myself, was I going to do it again.
I think I will continue my road trip probably starting in late June. I want to ride the part through Glacier National Park.
"It helps keep you young," the Doctor said.