Pediatrician: Does your child spend at least an hour a day in active play?
Klara: I’m a kid. All I do is play. Playing is my job. When I grow up, I will have a real job and be a boss like my Mommy.
Pediatrician: Does she speak in complete sentences and answer simple questions in a meaningful way?
Klara is already a boss.
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Yep. Gotta make the Doc listen sometimes….
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Come on, Clarissa, you’re an author making up making up this dialogue, aren’t you??
In all my long years of being a patient, the only time I ever heard a doctor asking such semi-coherent questions was when I became old enough for the government to pay me $25 to take its annual “Medicare Wellness Exam” (designed to save Uncle Sam $$ by catching developing medical conditions early). The doctor read from a printed list of questions so awkward that only a government committee could have penned them. Sample: “Do you have any visual or hearing loss while driving?” My answer: “Why in the hell would my visual or hearing loss be any different in a vehicle than anywhere else?” (The question MEANT: “Do you find yourself suddenly disoriented by sudden bright lights or noises while driving around?” — but that it isn’t what it asked.)
In reality, physician-patient question and answer sessions go more like this. Young medical student Dreidel to an ER patient 60 years ago: “What brought you to the hospital?” Patient: “The bus.” Almost-a-Dr. Dreidel: “No, I mean, WHY did you come to the hospital?” Patient: “Aunt Minnie got tired of my bitching, and told me to get my ass to the doctor.”
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I swear these were the questions. She rattles them off a sheet of paper, so these are definitely canned questions.
The reason why I’m not a writer of fiction is that I have zero imagination. I can retell what happened in a cute, engaging way but I can’t make anything up.
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