I have a good friend who is a cancer survivor. In the past few weeks, she blogged about her experience with her first mammogram. Those of us who are men can’t appreciate what women go through in the sometimes excruciating process of being administered a mammogram. But what’s worse is the waiting game that they must endure to get their results. My friend chronicled what thoughts go through the head of a cancer survivor, and my wife who has not had cancer confirmed what it’s like to wait and wonder for a week to ten days. 

Think about all of the other medical procedures that are performed as we grow older. When I had a garden hose shoved up my rear-end a few years ago (a procedure also known as a colonoscopy) the doctor told me immediately that I was clean as a whistle – literally and medically. I didn’t use an anesthetic so he was able to tell me during the procedure that he saw nothing. The same is true with an EKG.

What I don’t understand is why it takes so cotton-pickin’ long to be informed about certain types of medical results. Mammograms top the list. Blood work is right up there. If the quacks can look at an MRI image and tell me instantly where my rotator cuff is torn, why does it take them two weeks to tell me that my cholesterol has dropped 40 points (it hasn’t)? Yet, they can tell me before the pee in the cup I filled is cold, that the result is normal. I don’t understand.

I propose that medical professionals subscribe to Dr. Pistoph’s Patient’s Bill of Rights. Here it is:

1.     Never will a patient be left wondering about the results from any sort of test that could involve a life or death issue. Instead, the physician will provide the results before the patient leaves the office or clinic. This means the physician or clinic may need to purchase some additional equipment in order to meet this deadline. Yeah, it may be expensive so you’ll just have to wait to buy that third yacht.

2.     And while we’re at it, no patient will have to wait more than five minutes beyond his or her appointment time before being seen. Oh, and this doesn’t mean being stuck in an exam room in a backless paper gown for 30 minutes.

3.     Physicians will spend the money necessary to purchase newfangled scanning equipment that does not require crushing a woman’s boobs, shoving unmentionable things up a woman’s hoo-ha, or sticking a probing finger up a man’s bungus.

There, I’m glad that’s cleared up.