By Eli Daniel Ehrenpreis
“Who will ask me for medical advice at this wedding?”
The music wasn’t banging loudly, so this time, sitting alone and having a drink, I am able to internalize my thoughts without interruption. I want to solve their medical problems. I want to have a perfect memory.
The exercises start: Reasoning, remembering, synthesizing…. all are functioning well. Guidelines, diagnostic hints, eponyms, treatments, adverse effects, CAM, data analysis…all there. There are the concepts that I can reach directly from inside of my head; there are the memories that are tucked away that I can rapidly retrieve. If I think for instance of the names of the wrist bones-scaphoid, lunate, trapezius, trapezoid, hamate, capitate from the mnemonic SLT your wrist-that I memorized forty years ago-they materialize when summoned. The causes of anion gap acidosis-SKUMPILE. The Chief of Medicine ranting about high output cardiac failure and destroying you if you treat it with Lasix.
Sometimes it’s hard to relax.
The regs at work don’t do this. They find me and my thoughts too distracting. Gargoyles still stare down from old buildings at me as I walk along the quad.
I once piped up that “fenugreek makes your urine smell like maple syrup” during one of those dog and pony shows for doctors; an academic type giving a lecture trashing alternative medicine; the audience eating their steaks and drinking their wine. So, when I mentioned the maple syrup, one of the regs whistled in that “anyone can look up facts like that on their phones” …and I decided not to defend myself.
I see that this same guy is at the wedding.
After dinner, an acquaintance and I are discussing his prostate cancer, when a millennial runs into the reception hall looking for my help, because an elderly guy is standing by the bathroom saying that he isn’t feeling well. I go to check. He’s just a drunk old doc who overdid it at the open bar. I send him home after coffee and some psychotherapy.
In the meantime, I notice that the reg doctor from the meeting is walking away in the opposite direction so he can avoid the situation near the bathroom.
The acquaintance with cancer sees it all. And he says to me, “That’s why people ask you for medical advice at weddings. Not him.”
Eli Daniel Ehrenpreis, M.D., started life as a musician then became a physician, educator, writer, and inventor. He stopped seeing patients due to disability. His latest book, The Mesentery in Health and Disease, was published by Springer International. His prose and poetry writing often focuses on his own experiences. He has three adult children and lives with his wife Ana and two small dogs in Skokie, Illinois.
Jean Lemonnier was born in July 1999 in Bayonne, France. Interested in notions of sciences and spirituality like the void or the inner infinity of moments in suspension, Jean aims to create fictions of alternative permanences through different mediums. In 2021, Jean degreed from the MO.CO. ESBA fine arts school based in Montpellier, France, where his practice was based on drawing, engraving, video, volume with wood and metal. He’s currently living and working in Ibaraki, Japan, where he continues his studies on the master Global Art Practice of the Tokyo University of the Arts.