One out of every ten doctors finished in the lowest ten percent of his or her medical school. When I was 15, I was unfortunate enough to run into one of them. Dr. Mitchell, deceased at least a few decades ago, was our “family doctor.” He did have a diploma from a medical school. I vaguely remember seeing that framed in his office. He also had a stethoscope, a prescription pad, a white robe, all the trappings that would convince people he was a real doctor.
Pushing the narrative forward:
When I was 15 years old, I decided to become a jock. I also continued to live in Texas. Hormones were at work. I decided to be a football jock (that’s what you do in Texas). I was prepared to dumb myself down, to start speaking incorrect English, even to develop my muscles instead of my brain. This was all, quite possibly, my most conspicuous failure. The football coach thought the best way to save me from death by high school sports was to make me a field goal and PAT kicker. I was surprised to learn that you had to wear pads even for that.
After a week, I was able to kick a PAT fairly consistently and had worked my way up to being able to kick a field goal through the uprights from about twenty yards out approximately 50% of the time. That was, of course, when I was standing at one end of the field practicing and the other high school jocks were at the other end of the practice field.
One day, though, we had a scrimmage: 11 guys playing offense, 11 guys on defense. I was, at some point in the game, sent in to kick a meaningless 20-yard field goal. The center snapped the ball to the third-string quarterback; the quarterback held the ball perfectly; I started moving forward five steps to kick the ball. Then I noticed eleven guys all trying to kill me.
Okay, they weren’t really trying to kill me, only trying to keep me from kicking the ball. And only one of them reached me. He blocked my field goal attempt and then ploughed into me. In football it is perfectly legal to destroy the kicker as long as you block his kick first. I was okay except for my left arm. It hurt…a lot. And I kept having visions of eleven people trying to kill me.
Encounter with the Lowest Ten Percenter
Two days later, the pain not having gone away, my mother took me to see good old Dr. Mitchell. He examined my arm, feeling it with his fat fingers, making it hurt more, and pronounced it a severe sprain. “It’ll heal itself,” he said. He wrote a prescription for a pain killer, gave me a note excusing me from football practice, sent me home.
Two weeks later, the pain not having gone away, my mother took me to see good old Dr. Mitchell. He examined my arm again, felt a little bump, and told us that it had been broken and had healed incorrectly.
His solution to this was right out of Torquemada: Rebreak the arm and set it correctly.
That sounds simple. Here’s what happened: He gave me a local to kill the pain in my arm, propped my arm against his knee, and pulled on it until it broke again with a loud SNAP. The painkiller was largely ineffective…it hurt like hell. Then he maneuvered the bone until the two parts of it fit together. By the time he finished splinting it and getting a cast on, I would have confessed to anything.
Afterwards
The football dream was gone (and my chances of becoming a Hall of Famer, but that had all been about girls anyway and most of them liked the cast. Even now, though, some decades afterwards, my left arm is still bowed where the incompetent doctor tried to repair his earlier mistake.
I learned a few lessons from that whole experience: 1) I was not meant to be a football jock and 2) check out doctors before you let them do anything to you. The first of those I should have known anyway. Chess team was more my style.
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