ETERNITY

From time to time, I reflect upon my life. Surprised, no?

After a series of souls who have “googled” their symptoms, and then promenaded into my urgent care, sharing with me the benefits (such as they are) of their newly fond expertise in All! Things! Medical!, I consider Eternity, and my likely version thereof.

First, the “consultants” who see me. Pro Tip: your clinician is not going to be favorably impressed by the results of your internet search. In all likelihood, he/she has spent a considerable amount of time, money, effort, and lost sleep over many years to acquire the knowledge and (more importantly) the judgment to assess your symptoms, examine you and interpret the junction of symptoms/physical exam findings, in order to reach a conclusion regarding the most likely cause of your particular malady. These self same hard acquired skills and knowledge are then brought to bear in order to establish a plan designed to mitigate your discomfort or cure your problem.

Google does not provide you with the experience, in most cases extending for decades, which allows the thoughtful practitioner to reject irrelevant information, and weigh relevant information, and provide you the benefit of that education and years, nay, decades, of experience.

So, for the love of Ghawd, just DON’T!

Secondly, Eternity. Since I have lived a life of misjudgments and misdeeds (the Plaintiff told me!), I know I’m going to Hell. In keeping with Dante’s view of perdition, it is likely that I will have my own, custom designed Hell. I predict that I will spend Eternity as Hell’s urgent care midlevel, spending my time with an unending stream of trivially sick folks who will not only bring me the results of their own Hell’s Google search of their imagined symptoms, but ALSO, will spend FOREVER to not answer my simple history, medication, and allergy questions. And, Sisyphean, once they swerve into a lane that brings promise of eventually actually, ya know, ANSWERING my Gorammed questions, they will promptly swerve again into circular logic and non sequiturs.

Occasionally, when I have had a particularly lengthy string of such creatures, my staff will tease me. “So, Reltney, you fixing to climb up on the roof and bombard helpless pedestrians with boxes of Z-Pack?”

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