Doctors Stumped

My eyes are as weird as I am. Different defects in each eye. A bright dot appears to me as a vertical line with one eye and as a star with the other – astigmatism - and such strange stuff. During my last eye tests, my ophthalmologist finally prescribed glasses that turned out pretty good in the end. When I collected the glasses (‘plastics’, in fact. The lenses of these spectacles are actually made of organic compounds and not inorganic glass) he made me read the normal board again. He was satisfied with his work. So was I.

Then he gave me a card with small print on it. I wondered for a moment if this was a doctor or a lawyer. After all, lawyers are famous, or rather notorious, for things in small print. All the unimportant stuff is in large readable (I did not say understandable, mind you) font size and all the important stuff in the unreadable, un-understandable small print. It turned out that he wanted to see how my new ‘plastics’ performed when I read small type. My job consists of about 99% reading and 1% writing. Thus, this was important. I could read the small print satisfactorily – to both the doctor and I.

Then I assumed an astonished look and exclaimed. “Doctor, your new glasses (after all, they were still his glasses as I had not yet paid them yet) are so good that I can even read Tamizh and Bangali and proceeded to read the first sentences of the small passages in each of those languages. For a moment he looked so taken aback. Soon the surprised look remained but its character had changed. He was now surprised (mildly) that I could read those languages as well.

Years ago I had been to an ENT specialist since I had some problems in my right ear. (All my problems are in that general area - above the neck. sometimes right between the ears) Whenever I spoke, the sound sounded as if it was resounding in my head. (Perhaps, I should have gone to a neurosurgeon to see if there was a larger hollow space inside my head which was causing this revergeration but, at that time I had decided that my ears needed looking into, literally)

As expected, the good doctor inserted an Otoscope into my ear and looked long and hard and from various angles. He then shifted to the left ear and did all the looking-into all over again.

While I was being so inter-viewed I got the image that he was actually trying to see what was there (if anything at all) inside my head.

Finally he got up and stood in front of me, arms akimbo, and said, quite pensively, “There is nothing organic there…” I put on a disappointed look and asked him plaintively, “Not even a cabbage, Doctor?”

The doctor looked at me incredulously and uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then he guffawed uncontrollably. The doctor was a ‘serious type’ and this guffaw brought the receptionist to the door, she peeped in to make sure that he was fine. He was.

The doctor did not charge me anything for this visit. Oh, not because of my joke as is usual in such stories. It was only because he was my cousin’s associate.