doctor doom

A few weeks ago, I go to my (or rather, my wife's) general practitioner, Dr. Glasser, to get a shitload of shots for our trip. I'm a dude (yeah, no shit) and as a dude, I basically never go to the doctor - even if I had a tumor the size of Uranus in my actual anus, I'd probably still be going, "Ahh, I'm fine. Don't worry about it." Fortunately, Maya (the Jewish hypochondriac that she is) won't stand for this, and so she sent me off to her doctor, Dr, Glasser, for some preventive medicine. Unfortunately, Dr. Glasser fucking sucks, as you will soon learn.

So I go in, tell him our whole itinerary, get three different shots (the typhoid vaccine, some other vaccine I can't remember, and another one), a TB test, and a general check-up blood test. He says I should schedule another appointment in a week or so to get two more shots and a prescription for anti-malarial pills. A week or so passes and I come back into the office. When he opens the door and calls my name, the first thing he says on seeing me is "Why are you here again?" I'm like, "I have to get a couple more shots." He's like, "Really?" Uhhh...what?! It's like I stepped into an alternate universe or something. Dude, you told me to come in and get more shots. It's not like I have a fetish for getting hypodermic needles stuck into my arm and I'm trying to scam you into jabbing me a few more times, or something.

We get to his private office, he looks over my files, asks me again where I'm going, and he's like, "No, you don't need any more shots." "What about the rabies vaccine?" I ask specifically. "You're not planning on doing any veterinary work over there, are you?" he chuckles. "Then no, you don't need that." I'm like, "O...K... Well, I still need a prescription for some anti-malarial pills." He's like, "You guys aren't planning on trekking into the jungle or going off into the swamps, are you? You're basically just going to stick to the tourist areas, right?" I'm like, "Pretty much..." to which he responds, "Well, you really shouldn't have to worry about malaria then." Cue jaw falling to the floor. Basically, I end up having to beg him to prescribe me some anti-malarial shit, and then having to further beg him to prescribe me some general just-in-case antibiotics. Needlessly to say, I walk out of the appointment very confused.

I talk to Maya that night, and we think about what other shots I was supposed to get. And she's like, "I really think you need a polio booster." So the next day, at work, I call Doc Glasser and ask him if I can come in for a polio booster. He's like, "Sure, if you really want to. But it's really only advised if you're going to [insert country name], [insert country name], [insert country name], Southeast Asia..." Are you kidding me?!

So I come back in, get my polio booster. Maya goes in, to get a few shots and anti-malarial and antibiotic prescriptions of her own. She has to beg him for those as well, and he ends up prescribing even less to her than he did to me. We both decide we need to get a second opinion about all this shit.

Maya, bless her, does some research and finds this place, Traveler's Medical Service on 57th St. and Madison, and we go in for a pre-travel consultation. To make an already long story short(er), the woman there, Dyan (who's super cool), tells us that our doctor prescribed us the wrong antibiotic (Southeast Asia is resistant to the type he gave us) and not nearly enough anti-malarial pills (and the most expensive type at that). She also says that if we had come in sooner (at this point, there's only two weeks to go before our departure) she would have advised us to get the Japanese encephalitis vaccine and, wait for it, the rabies vaccine (Are you fucking with me?!), both of which are multiple-shot procedures that have to be spread over more than two weeks. On the rabies front, she adds that when she was in Thailand a few years ago (and not doing veterinary work), she was actually bit by a homeless dog that snuck up on her while she was waiting for a train... And then, on the morning news some other day, we'll see a woman (also not a vet) talking about what a great, inexpensive vacation spot Thailand is - "I did get bitten by a monkey while I was there," she notes. "But Bangkok is great."

The moral here is obvious. Don't trust your general practitioner for pre-travel medicine...especially if your doctor's name is Glasser. We ended getting new prescriptions for different antibiotics, and for different and way more anti-malarial pills. And we've started the Japanese encephalitis vaccination process (a gross little trivia point: The vaccine is made from mouse brains) even though we don't have enough time to get all the necessary shots before we leave, with plans to get the third and final shot when we're in China.

Man, we haven't even left yet, and the (mis)adventures are already in full fucking swing.