Donovan Gray Dude, Where's My Stethoscope

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.Either that or an astronaut.Doctor was nowhere to be found on my list of potential occupations.The following year my latent allergy genes manifested big-time.Almost overnight I became the undisputed poster boy for atopic disease.After a month or two of watching me scratch, sniffle and wheeze, my mother went out and found us a family physician.Dr.Grenier was a lanky, middle-aged fellow with curly brown hair and an unruly moustache.He seemed to enjoy making house calls.Every Saturday morning he’d visit our modest little home in Chambly, Québec to give me an allergy shot.Although I wasn’t crazy about the injections, I didn’t put up much of a fuss because when he was finished he’d always wink and toss me the empty plastic syringe.If he wasn’t running too far behind schedule he’d accept my mother’s offer of a cup of coffee.While he drank it, he and my dad would sit at the kitchen table and have a spirited debate about whether Rusty Staub and the Montreal Expos would ever manage to climb out of the cellar in the National League East.When the coffee and conversation were finished he’d pack up his mysterious black bag, tell me to be un bon garçon, and zoom off in his neon-yellow Citroën.As I filled the syringe with cherry Kool-Aid and chased my terrified little brother around the house (time for your needle, Robin! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!), sometimes I’d concede that although being a baseball player or an astronaut would be amazing, being a doctor might be kind of okay, too.*The year I turned 11 my father accepted a job offer from the Ministry of Education in Jamaica.That summer our family packed up and moved from Chambly to a suburb just outside of Kingston.Once the initial culture shock subsided I began exploring my new environment.One good thing about the move was that it allowed me the opportunity to finally meet several family friends and relatives whom I had previously only spoken to on the telephone or seen in photographs.My godfather Maurison was one such person.He was my dad’s best friend from back in the Precambrian era when they were both bachelors.Their paths had separated when Maurison immigrated to Germany to study medicine.Upon completion of his studies he returned to Kingston to start a general practice.He could easily have opened his office in an affluent neighbourhood and grown wealthy over time, but that career trajectory held no appeal for him.Instead he set up shop in a desperately poor, underserviced and slightly dangerous part of the city.He worked long hours, coordinated public health outreach programs and allowed his patients to pay whatever they could afford.He didn’t get rich, but he loved his work and the community adored him.Maurison looked after my various allergy-related afflictions, so over the next few years I ended up spending a lot of time in his office.Since I was his godson, no part of the building was considered out of bounds to me.I’d leaf through his illustrated medical textbooks, count the bones in the artificial skeleton hanging in the storage room, marvel at the distorted cortical homunculus figurine and puzzle over arcane pieces of medical equipment in the various cupboards and drawers.The one I liked best was a device similar to an egg timer that he often carried in one of his lab coat pockets.As far as I could tell, its only function was to ring loudly 30 minutes after it was switched on.One day I asked him what it was for.“Oh that,” he grinned.“If I’m running late and I’m about to see a patient who tends to ramble, I turn it on before I go in.When it starts ringing I exit under the pretense of having to take an urgent call from the hospital.It’s not exactly kosher, but sometimes that’s the only way I can escape from an examination room!”“Wow,” I thought, as I left his office that day, “Life-saving work.Cool gear.A dash of subterfuge.Aside from the lousy hours, medicine’s not such a bad gig after all….”*When I was 19 my family moved from Jamaica back to Canada.We arrived in Winnipeg a few weeks before I was scheduled to enter university.My grades were excellent, but I had no clue as to what I wanted to study.Education? English literature? Law? In the midst of my tortuous deliberations I got a letter from Paul, a good friend from my high school in Jamaica.He informed me that my old flame was dating a medical student [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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