Good Doc, Bad Doc

I felt defenseless being shoulder-to-shoulder with cavalier strangers on the subway. Heading down a crowded staircase filled my mind with images of a rag doll skier tumbling down a rocky ledge, with each commuter representing a granite boulder that would either bruise me as I passed, or roll down and crush me from behind. I braced for the worst, but managed to make it on and off the train without getting bumped or suffering any pain beyond that of simply walking, which was bad enough as it was. The subtle up and down and gentle sway of a casual gait jostled my purple, black, and orange jelly balloon arm just enough to grind together the zig-zag ends of my broken bone, causing me to hold my breath and grit my teeth. Whenever I let my guard down and got too casual, I yelped.

When I finally made it to the doctor’s office and got past the struggle of filling out paperwork with my broken dominant arm, I lowered myself into a chair and breathed a sigh of relief. “Hard part’s over.”

I’d been to see a neurologist once before and the most elaborate test they performed was hitting my knee with a rubber mallet, and touching my fingertip to my nose, however, since then I’ve begun showing signs of diabetic neuropathy — peripheral nerve damage caused by years of type 1 diabetes — so between that and the symptoms from my accident I fully expected this visit to be a little more involved. But I had no idea what a nerve conduction study, or NCS, entailed.

I was called into the examination room by the doctor’s assistant, a short, round woman with thin hair and a thick accent. Once we got past the trick of getting my arm brace and T-shirt off, she ordered me to lie down.

“I don’t think I can,” said.

I’ve been sleeping in an upright position, like sleeping on a bus. When I once made the mistake of lying down, I had a fit of Tourette’s Syndrome before Deborah helped me back up.

“If I do, I’m afraid I won’t be able to get back up,” I said.

“Okey, vee kin do it anudder vay,” she said.

By “do it” she meant attach electrodes to my fingers. Although I was there because my accident left me with a tingling numbness in my right hand, she needed to do a test of both arms for comparison. She started with my left one because it was easier. She rolled a cart to the edge of the examination table where I was sitting. She took a few thin wires and plugged one end of each into a junction box attached to the side of the cart. At the other end of each wire was a sticky sensor that she attached to my left index finger. She typed some information into a keyboard, adjusted a few dials, and then pulled what appeared to be a Taser from the far side of the table.

“You are going to feel a leeddle something,” she said. “It vont hurt you. It vill be like touching a doorknob after valking across de rug.”

She coated the Taser with a few dollops of conductive gel and touched it to my arm. “Relax,” she said, and the hit a button on the keyboard.

SHAZAM!

“Whoa! Holy smokes! A doorknob? Are you kidding me? Only if the doorknob is plugged directly into a wall socket.”

“Dat vas a good jump,” she said. “Don’t try dis at home.” She adjusted a dial and then put the Taser on my forearm again. “Relax,” she said. “Now you know vuht to expect. Dun’t vorry, you vill get used to it.”

The electric shock hurt, no doubt about it, but it wasn’t my main concern. The problem was that every time she shocked me, I jumped, and every time I jumped, my arm twisted and torqued, sending half my arm bone one way and half another.

“Yowza.”

She moved the sensors to different fingers, to my forearm, to the top of my hand, to my wrist, my thumb, on and on, shocking me a dozen times in each position, stopping now and then to coat the Taser’s metal prods with clear, conductive goo. She varied the voltage each time so that sometimes I barely felt a thing, while other times I felt like I was suspended naked in a damp cellar while a man in rubber gloves sparked me with a set of jumper cables.

When she finished with my good arm, she took a minute to look at my purple, bloated one. “How are vee going to do dis?” she said.

Good question.

I did my best to grit my teeth and get my arm into the proper position. Just holding it in such a way that she could place the Taser where it needed to be was painful enough, but when she started shocking me, I started to sweat. After only a few tests, she put the Taser down and told me to relax, the doctor would be in to see me shortly.

When he arrived, the neurologist shook my hand — my left one—and introduced himself. He was wearing a pink and white striped shirt and a pink tie with tiny white polka dots. Suspenders could be seen through the thin white fabric of his lab coat.

“Good doctor, bad doctor?” I said, thinking the assistant had finished with the dirty work and that he was there to play nice.

“What?” he said.

“You know, good cop bad cop.”

He chuckled as he took a seat at the computer and began looking over my results. “But we’ll have to wait to see which is which.”

“Uh oh.”

“Yes. We’re going to need you to lie down. We can’t get the results otherwise. How can we make that happen?”

“I can do it,” I said. After what I’d just been through, worrying about the brief, though real, pain of changing position seemed absurd.

It was a bitch, but with two pillows under my head and one under my arm, I settled into a position that was only mildly excruciating. Wincing, puffing, I slowly, very slowly, straightened my arm. The doctor took hold of it and gently tugged it away from my body. “Arghhhmmmpfffttchrrshiii…”

“Okay, try to relax. We need you to relax.”

I started laughing. “Okay, okay.” After a series of short, quick breaths, puffing, puffing, I took a nice, long, deep one and went as limp as I could.

Depending on the voltage of the shock machine, the position of my broken arm, and my delirious, grasping state of mind, I felt everything from a crushing dull ache to a sharp, splintery crack of fire. I sweated, I swore, I bit my lip.

This went on for close to an hour.

“Do you have this much pain at home?” he asked.

What kind of kinky pervert did he take me for? I started laughing. “No,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Generally, I can settle into a position where it doesn’t hurt at all. I mean, sometimes it hurts, but this is way beyond.”

“Did they give you any painkillers?”

“Yeah. But I stopped taking them.”

“Why?”

“They make me sick.”

He seemed to find it mildly curious.

As he twisted my arm into place to reach the Taser behind my elbow, I finally cracked. Tears began streaming from my eyes. I huffed and puffed and gurgled. “Mmmfffshhfuuumthrgddmn…ungghhh…I give up. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

“Okay,” he said after a few final jolts, “you need a rest.”

“You think?”

“You’re doing great. Try to find a comfortable position and relax. I’ll be back in a little while. We’re almost done.”

It took several minutes for me to catch my breath and find a reasonably comfortable way to lie. I wiped away the sweat and tears and tried to focus on ice cream and daffodils. Eventually, I dove into a sloshy sea of endorphins and fell asleep.

“You got it?” I heard the assistant say as she and the doctor returned to the examination room, apparently surprised that the doctor had managed to shock me in all the places she’d been too sympathetic to reach.

“Got it,” he said.

She mumbled something else I couldn’t make out.

“He’s tolerating,” the doctor replied.

The nurse gave my arm a reassuring caress. “How you doing?”

“Whew,” I said. “And I thought you were bad.”

“Now, we need to test your muscles,” said the doctor. “We do that by sticking them with a sterile needle, which allows us to see what’s going on inside.”

I can only imagine what kind of expression I gave him.

“Really,” he said, “that’s the test. I’m not making these up.”

I was allowed to stand this time. Getting up hurt exactly as much as I expected it would, which was a lot. But by comparison to what I’d just gone through, it hurt as much as a swim through pudding.

In addition to visual feedback in the form of a sine wave on the computer screen, the needle he put in my muscles was connected to a speaker. As he pushed the needle into my arm, it sounded like connecting a guitar cable to a live amplifier. Pop, crackle, hiss, crackle, pop.

“Why is that funny?” the doctor asked.

I didn’t even realize I was laughing. “I don’t know. Never mind me. I’m delirious.”

After wiping it down with alcohol, he stuck the needle into the first muscle — who knows which one, my bicep?

“Relax, relax, relax,” he said, twisting the needle around to get it in the right spot. “Okay, now contract. More…more…more…good. Okay, relax.”

He pulled the needle out of my forearm and stuck it between my thumb and forefinger. The out of my thumb and into my deltoid. One muscle to the next, stick it in, wiggle it into place, relax, contract, wiggle it out, wipe it off, and into the next.

Contracting the muscles of my broken arm had me panting and sweating, bleating, grunting, and wincing all over again.

Three hours later, when all was said and done, the doctor assessed that there had been minor damage to my ulnar nerve, but that it would get better. “The problem is,” he said, “you came in too early. It’s too soon to know what sort of damage has occurred. Your nerves could be dying, we don’t know. You should come back for more tests in another two weeks.”

Yeah, okay. If I don’t skip town first.