So my doctors appointment was mostly uneventful. They didn’t really tell me anything I couldn’t already guess. (Exercise, lose some poundage, stop eating crap. Real surprise, right? That’ll be $450 please.)

Apparently they are screening for domestic violence or some such. I forgot to mention this gem from the new patient intake process:

Them: “Is there anyone who makes you feel unsafe at home?”

Me: “Well, the last time someone made me feel unsafe in my home, I killed them.”

Them: <pause> “Ok, the doctor will be with you shortly”

I understand that an argument could be made that the doctor needs to look at certain environmental considerations in order to get a full, well-rounded picture of your health. What you do for a living, what your living situation is, etc. You may have a rash on your skin that no one can explain…until the doctor discovers that you work in a plutonium processing plant, at which point the penny drops. So, yes, I can understand some of the questioning. But at the same time, I’m just here for some bloodwork…not to trade life stories with some assistant.

However, some doctor/patient interactions are interesting stories. I had an elderly customer come into the shop once with a beautifully preserved old Smith .32 revolver. I asked the customer, who was a doctor, how he had come into such a lovely and well-preserved pre-war Smith. Turned out his dad was a stereotypical country doctor …taking payment in chickens, that sort of thing…back during the Depression. One day dad and the sheriff had to go quarantine a family. This was back in the day where they would nail a notice of quarantine on the house and everyone would keep away and isolate the residents. So the doctor and the sheriff go up on the porch and start tacking this notice up on the door. A gunshot rings out and the deputy tumbles backwards with a bullet where his beltplate should have been, the bullet coming right through the door the deputy had been tacking the notice onto. The doctor, demonstrating the better part of valor, rockets of the porch and into a ditch by the road. He then runs down the road to a house with a phone and calls the sheriff. Sheriff comes out and they drag the guy out of the house and haul him to jail. As the sheriff is winding things down, he walks up to the doc, tosses him the pistol the bad guy used, and says “Here. Souvenir.” And his dad kept that pistol for the rest of his life and it wound up going to my customer. He had no intention of selling it, but liked telling the story.

I bet that country doctor never asked anyone about their preferred pronouns, what their ‘assigned’ sex at birth was, or if anyone in the house made them feel unsafe. Different, and in some ways better, times.

The year is 7.67% done and so far I have only bought __1__ gun