Monday, April 03, 2006

What Not to Ask Your Doctor's Office

So, I find I need to go to the doctor's this week for a problem I'm having. Namely, I think I have allergies and b, I can't sleep too well.

I call up the doctor's office this morning and my doctor is not available until Friday. Since I’m fairly miserable right NOW, I decide to see if another doctor is available.  Sure enough, there is another doctor - a Dr. Rodriguez.

Given the area of town that my doctor's office is in, I kind of made a faux pas and asked if the doctor speaks good English.

The operator sort of hesitated and goes, "All our doctors speak good English."

How much you wanna bet she had a name in mind for me and it rhymes with bassist? :)

But I'm not a racist. At all. Actually, that's not the correct term for someone who doesn't like other ethnicities. A general term like bigot or prejudiced motherf*cker would be correct. But racist - no. Hispanic people are not another race; they are another ethnicity.

That's not really the point though. The point is that I had this doctor long ago and he was Hispanic. That, in and of itself, was fine. What was not fine is that we could barely communicate. So thereafter, I have been leary of going to doctors who may or may not speak good English, be they white, black, brown, purple, or whatever. I just want to be able to talk to my doctor!

But now I'm gonna feel bad when I go to see Dr. Rodriguez tomorrow. Maybe that feeling of being an a**hole will wear off by then...

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