"What's Up, Doc?"

I'm not exactly sure why doctors speak the way they do. When giving a physical, prescribing a drug, or delivering a diagnosis, they insist on using words which have absolutely no meaning to people outside of the medical profession, five-dollar words like intracranial sesquipedalian hematoma. These are people who have endured years of medical school; they must know that they're dealing with individuals who think humerus is another word for funny, weenus is something your brother used to call you in elementary school, and a sphincter is an old statue in Egypt (Of course, they know enough to realize that if you have an infarction in public, you are socially obligated to claim it; however, doctors should not expect much more than that from a layman). So why do they continue to persist in teasing us with their unintelligible prognoses?

I have had a couple of encounters in the past with doctors whom I could not understand because of their strict adherence to medical terminology. When I was nine I had a bladder infection. It was extremely painful (much like the violinist's rendition of Pachelbel's Canon in D at the Christmas concert I attended tonight. You know, hearing that poorly played instrument made me realize that Vincent van Gogh probably cut off his own ear because he attended a high school concert. Some people say he was nuts because he cut an ear off, but actually he was nuts because he didn't cut off both of them during the violin solo). Unfortunately, when the doctor was asking questions, I had to figure out from the context that he was talking about my nether regions. At one point, I looked at my mom for a translation, but she just looked away uncomfortably (When I finally did figure out what the h--- he was talking about, it suddenly became even more awkward to have my mom sitting there, almost as awkward as listening to that group of teenage white boys at the concert tonight who sang "Mary Had A Baby, Oh, My Lord." Ha. "Oh, My Lord" is right; I couldn't have said it better myself if I had beenone of  the white boys trying to sing it in front of an auditorium of people dressed in denim overalls, wife-beaters, and cowboy boots).

Then, when I was 18, I had a physical because was about to leave the country for a couple of years. The doctor checked...everything and gave me a clean bill of health. When I got to the car, I read the photocopied file the doctor had given me: "Has a giant nevus on his chest."

Naturally, I was infuriated. I felt betrayed because the doctor had dailed to let me know that I had something wrong with me. Not to mention, a nevus sounded like an awful thing to have. Well, I eventually calmed down enough to realize that the doctor was actually referring to a large birthmark I have had on my chest since I was born; I simply had never heard it referred to in that way before.

Miscommunications rule our lives and generally because most of us prefer to say what we want to say exactly the way we want to say it. Perhaps, we ought to give more thought to who is listening. After all, we are as responsible for the hearer as we are for the speaker.