Woke up last week, went into the bathroom, and left the toilet bowl full of blood. Shocking red. Holy Christ, I say to myself, and take myself off to the closest emergency room. Fortunately, after tests and X-rays and assorted disgusting stuff, the diagnosis was a bacterial infection and, in fact, the antibiotics seem to have knocked it down. Whew!

(That's one of the more horrifying health moments I've had.)

Prompted by my recent experience, I asked around for a family doctor and eventually got the name of a guy fairly close to me.

What an experience. The last time I had a physical (that physician has retired, which is why I haven't had an exam for a while), the nurse did lots of stuff, then I saw the doctor for maybe five or ten minutes, and that was it. And the same has pretty much been true of every doctor I've seen in my life.

This guy was different. He is a physician's physician. While, yes, the nurse did a lot of the prep work, the doctor himself must have spent thirty or forty-five minutes talking with me, discussing my health and various things, explaining what he was looking for and what he was doing, in general being the absolute epitome of a good old general practitioner (despite being in one of these modern medical complexes). He was a very personable, friendly, outgoing, likable guy (none of this cold bedside manner you often hear about).

He's having a lot of tests done (I think there were fourteen different blood tests he was going to do - some routine, checks for hepititis and so forth, though I'm at very low risk for them, some less routine), very concerned about my proper nutrition (probably rightly so, I know I don't eat "right" and rarely take vitamin supplements).

In short, if the person who gave me this doctor's name wasn't a guy I'd kiss him. Hopefully, when I go to the followup visit, there won't be anything seriously wrong. (alas, I had to wince when they weighed me - even though I had my shoes on, 233 is a hell of a lot more than I thought I weighed.)