Doctor, Doctor

My blog hasn’t been updated as often as I’d like this week, I’ve been feeling very sick these few days. In addition to that, I’ve been quite busy, no time to go to see my unsympathetic doctor. I've only been to the doctor twice in the past 12 months. Once for suspected dengue, once for a bad case of throat infection.

Speaking of going to the doctor, I’m reminded of a story my friend SA once told me when we were in university together. He was attending a sekolah asrama penuh (fully-residential secondary school) in Perak. His was quite a strict school, you couldn’t go home from college unless it was the term holidays or if you were sick.

So if he was quite homesick or desperate for some good home-cooked food, this is what he and his classmates would do: They would swallow a tube of toothpaste! Colgate or Darlie, it didn’t matter, the whole idea was to get a stomach-ache, and the accompanying cold forehead, shivers and/or slight temperature, all just to fool the resident doctor to give them a permission slip to go home for an extended weekend. Seemingly this 'tactic' was quite successful, since the doctor probably thought the students were not dumb enough to actually ingest a whole tube of toothpaste for the sake of going home.

This ‘tactic’ was also employed in the university days. The guys would give pathetic excuses like ‘stomachache’ or ‘headache’ (if for girls, ‘period pain’) to get an MC to skip classes or minor tests.

I never used these ‘tactics’ since I’m already at the clinic often enough with legitimate reasons (those days). In my final year, I heard the doctors wised up to the bogus ‘stomachache’ claims, everytime a guy used that complaint, the female doctor would ask the boy to strip off, slap on a latex glove and do an actual anal probe (I don’t know if this ‘exploratory’ service was extended to the girls, I’ve never heard them complain about it).

So, genuine stomach pains or not, drop your pants. Most fakers would just say something about, “Eh-heh, I think I’ll bear with the pain, lah….” or "It's a miracle! I'm healed!"

Can’t wait for the weekend.