Dave Barry - Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

3. “No, the thing over THERE, dammit.”

4. “Never mind.”

Our navigational policy was always to steer the boat in the direction of restaurants and hotels that had real bathrooms. Our boat allegedly had a bathroom (or as we say aboard ship, a “bathroom”), but it was about the size of those styrofoam containers you get Egg McMuffins in, and it was mostly filled with the marine toilet, a complex and punitive device that at any moment you expected to see a tentacle come snaking out of. Which is why the No. 1 rule of the sea is: If you absolutely have to use the marine toilet, you want to send Ralph in there first.

I would have to say that the greatest single achievement of the American medical establishment is nasal spray. Oh, I realize it can be overdone. A friend of mine named Tatnall claims he knew a woman who was so addicted to nasal spray that she carried some down the aisle on her wedding day. Her hand would go darting under her veil, and a snort would resound through the church. Tatnall swears this is true. So I fully agree that nasal-spray abuse is a serious problem and we certainly need some kind of enormous federal program to combat it.

But aside from that, I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I’m saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.

This is especially true when it comes to figuring out what is wrong with sick people. My experience has been that doctors will give you a clear-cut, understandable diagnosis only if you wander in with, say, an ice pick protruding from your skull. And even then, you have to pretend that you don’t know what’s wrong. If you say, “I have an ice pick in my skull,” the doctor will become irritated, because he spent all those years in medical school and he’s damned if he’s going to accept opinions from an untrained layperson such as yourself. “It conceivably could be an ice pick,” he’ll say, in a tone of voice that suggests he’s talking to a very stupid sheep, “but just in case I’m going to arrange for a test in which we remove a little snippet of your liver every week for eight weeks.” So your best bet is to keep your mouth shut and let the doctor diagnose the ice pick, which he will call by its Latin name.

If you have a subtler problem, however, you may never find out what’s wrong. For example, a few months back, one side of my tongue swelled up. I tried everything—aspirin, beer, nasal spray—but my tongue was still swollen. So I went to a doctor. His receptionist began my treatment by having me sit in the waiting room where I read a therapeutic article in a 1981 issue of National Geographic. That took me maybe an hour, during which I learned a great deal about this ancient tribe of people who managed to build a gigantic and photogenic temple in a jungle several thousand years ago despite the fact that they were extremely primitive at the time.

Step Two in the therapy was when a nurse put me in a little examination room with a paper-covered table, which evidently was emitting some kind of invisible healing rays because they had me sit there alone with it for 43 minutes by my watch. It wasn’t as boring as it sounds because there was a scale in there, so I could weigh myself for amusement.

To culminate the treatment, the actual doctor took a few moments out from his busy schedule of renewing his subscription to National Geographic and renting additional space for people to wait in and came right into the room with me and actually looked at my tongue. He was in the room with me for 2 minutes and 30 seconds by my watch, at the end of which he told me that my problem was two Latin words, which I later figured out meant swollen tongue. He said I should come back in a week. I considered suggesting that, seeing how I had already been there for almost two hours, maybe I should just spend the week in the examination room, but I was afraid this would anger him and he would send me to the hospital for tests. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, because at the hospital as soon as they find out what your Blue Cross number is they pounce on you with needles the size of turkey basters. Those are the two most popular doctor options: to tell you to come back in a week, or to send you to the hospital for tests. Another option would be to say, “it sure beats the heck out of me why your tongue is swollen,” but that could be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.

What I finally did was talk to a woman I know who used to be a nurse but had to quit because she kept wanting to punch doctors in the mouth, and she suggested that I gargle with salt water. I did, and the swelling went right away. Although of course this could also have been because of the paper-covered table.

I really envy my dog. When she gets sick or broken, we take her to the veterinarian, and he fixes her right up. No Latin words, no big deal. It’s a very satisfying experience, except of course for my dog, who routinely tries to launch herself out of the examining room through closed windows. I find myself thinking: why can’t I get medical care like this? How much more complicated can people be than dogs? I’m kind of hoping my dog’s tongue will swell up, because I’m dying to see how the veterinarian treats her. If he has her gargle with salt water, I’m going to start taking my problems to him.

As you are aware, each year the U.S. Surgeon General emerges from relative obscurity into the limelight of public attention and if he sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of winter. No, all kidding aside, what he does is issue his annual report, where he tells you that smoking is bad for you. In fact, for a while, previous surgeons general got so lazy that they were turning in the same report, over and over, until finally one year Richard Nixon got ketchup stains on it.

Anyway, the result of all this reporting is that the general public at large has gotten very strict about smoking. Hardly a day goes by when you don’t read a newspaper story like this:

“SAN FRANCIsco-The city commissioners here yesterday approved a tough new anti-smoking ordinance under which if you see a person light a cigarette in a public place, you can spit in this person’s face.”

I agree with this new strictness. And I’m not one of those holier-than-thou types who go around condemning smoking, drinking and senseless murder without ever having even tried them. I used to smoke cigarettes, plenty of them, sometimes two and three at a time when I had Creative Block and was hoping to accidentally set my office on fire so I could write a column about it.

And then one morning, four years ago, something happened that I will never forget. I woke up, and I looked at myself in the mirror, because I happened to wake up in the bathroom, and I said to myself: “Dave, you have a wonderful wife, you have a newborn son, you have a good job, you have friends who care about you, you have a lawnmower that starts on the second or third pull—you have everything a man could possibly want, and a whole lifetime ahead of you to enjoy it in. Why not smoke a cigarette right now?” And so I did. I didn’t quit until two years later, at Hannah Gardner’s annual extravaganza eggnog party, when I was overcome by a giant weepy guilt attack while under the influence of Hannah’s annual eggnog, the recipe for which we should all hope to God never falls into the hands of the Russians.

Not that it was easy to quit. Not at all. A few months back, I read a newspaper article that said the government, after much research, had decided that nicotine is an addictive drug, even worse than heroin, and I just had to laugh the bitter kind of laugh that Clark Gable laughs in Gone With the Wind when he realizes that the South has been reduced to a lump of carbon. I mean, surely the government has better things to spend its money on. Surely the government could have used these research funds to buy a military toilet seat, and just asked us former smokers about nicotine vs. heroin addiction. We could have simply pointed out that, when a commercial airliner takes off, the instant the wheels leave the ground, the pilot, who you would think would be busy steering or something, tells the smokers that they may light up. He does not tell the heroin addicts that they may stick their needles into themselves, does he? No, he doesn’t, because heroin addicts have enough self-control to survive a couple of heroin-free hours. But the pilot knows that if he doesn’t let the cigarette smokers get some nicotine into themselves immediately, they will sneak off to smoke in the bathroom, possibly setting it on fire, or, if already occupied by other smokers, they will try to get out on the wing.