I went to a doctor at the beginning of the week for a follow-up appointment about that abscess. I don’t have a regular doctor in this city, so I just use the walk-in clinic. Unfortunately, at these clinics, you never know who you’re going to get, and I tend to to be notoriously unlucky with doctors.

When last I visited, I was given Amoxicillin, had a swab taken, and was told to place a heating pad on the area a few times a day and to keep it wrapped in gauze. I had done that, and the wound was feeling much better, but the follow-up was just to be safe.

After sitting in the waiting room for half an hour, I was brought in to see the doctor, one I hadn’t met before. He asked me what the problem was, and I explained what had happened. Either the last doctor hadn’t written anything down in my file, or this man hadn’t read it. After dealing with him, I’m placing my bet on the latter.

I asked if the test results from the swab had come back, and he said he hadn’t seen anything about a test. I’m fairly sure the swab sample is taken to test for which bacteria caused the infection, allowing them to adjust the medication accordingly if needed. This seems like a fairly important safety check, but apparently he didn’t think so.

He asked to see the area, and immediately after I pulled off the gauze bandage he said, “An abscess can often be a sign of diabetes. That’s fine now, you can stop bandaging it. You’re cured, go home and have a shower.” Without another word, he left the office.

There are a number of reasons why I was dumbstruck by this:

1. He dropped the diabetes bomb and then left without any explanation. After researching it a bit and phoning my parents, who are both in the medical field, I’m not too worried about this. While it is apparently true that people with diabetes get abscesses more often, assuming someone could have diabetes from an abscess is a fairly large leap.
2. He just looked at it. He didn’t put gloves on and poke at it or ask me any questions about it, he just looked.
3. He told me to stop wearing a bandage on it and that I was cured, but the wound was still open. I’m not a doctor, but even I could see that it was most certainly not cured. You also don’t have to be a doctor to know that walking around with an open wound is not really a good thing to do, especially when it’s on an area that will rub up against your pants all day.
4. He left the office so abruptly that I couldn’t tell if the appointment was over or not. I didn’t know what he was doing. I spent the next few minutes standing there awkwardly, smelling myself because of the shower comment, before finding him in his administrative office and asking if we were done. On top of that, I had just showered an hour before seeing him, and I smelled mighty fine, thank you very much.

It occurred to me after leaving the clinic that he might have not even looked at the abscess. It seems like he just looked at the gauze bandage for signs of drainage instead. It’s possible that he assumed I hadn’t changed the bandage in the five days since my last appointment and, since the bandage was still in place, hadn’t showered. Upon seeing that there wasn’t much drainage on the bandage, he declared me cured. In reality, I’ve been showering, although awkwardly, and changing the bandage every morning.

Good thing I took time off work. I might have missed the chance to have a doctor completely brush me off. After leaving, I promptly discarded all of his advice, and I seem to be healing nicely.

I have this magical gift that allows me to find the stupidest doctors imaginable. If there’s a fool with an M.D. in the city, you can be sure I’ll track him down.