Bad Idea
by William 'Cully'
Bryant
The patient
stopped taking his diabetes medicine because his
cousin told him she had heard it was “bad
for him”. I inquired as to his cousin’s
qualifications, and evidently she was married to
a gentleman that had a friend in New Jersey who
had read “on the Internet” that it
could cause brain cancer, or liver disease, or
schizophrenia. He wasn’t quite sure, but he
was certain that he would not take it ever again.
He did tell me he had done some
“research” of his own. He handed me a
ragged pile of paper with a gleam of satisfaction
on his face. I looked through the fruit of his
labor. Evidently, he too had discovered how to
access the glorious World Wide Web and his
detective work had unearthed a heretofore hidden
case of a shepherd in Wales who had contracted
syphilis from taking the very drug in question. I
don’t recall the document’s source, but
I was surprised to see that it was not The
National Enquirer.
I tried to
convince him of the benefits of treatment. I
reviewed with him the mountains of careful,
unbiased, well-controlled trials that showed that
he would almost certainly benefit from treatment.
But alas, I am only his doctor. In the end, I
failed. I patted him on the back, wished him luck,
and asked him to let me know if ever I could help
him.
Of course, the
nature of life being what it is, it didn’t
take long for him to develop a small infection on
his toe. Given his raging diabetes, it rapidly
worsened. When he ended up with gangrene in the
foot, we worked feverishly to try and salvage the
situation. (I found it odd that, by that point,
any objection he had previously had to
pharmaceuticals seemed to have faded). Later, we
would both recall how the pungent aroma of blue
cheese that accompanied the gangrene was both
nauseating, and yet somehow simultaneously
stimulated the appetite; if you concentrated on
thoughts of crispy crackers and wine instead of
rotting flesh.
Ultimately,
the antibiotics and careful wound care failed,
and his lower leg was amputated just below the
knee.
His cousin,
the aforementioned bastion of sound scientific
principles, came to visit. It was quite humorous
to watch as he hopped around the hospital room on
his good leg, holding his stump out for her
inspection. “Look at this you moron!”
He shouted. I just stood there with my hands in
my pockets, staring at the floor and trying not
to laugh.
A few months
later, as we were trying to find a well-fitted
prosthetic leg, he made quite an astute
observation. “Doc”, he said. “I
don’t think syphilis would have been quite
so bad.”
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