Visits to the Doctors by Phillip Hoyle

I started going again to the doctors in my late twenties when my life seemed to complicate and I had started feeling stresses of work that caused pain and left me seeking relief.

Oh, I’d been to doctors before. Surely it was a doctor who delivered me from my mother’s womb, a doctor who filled my teeth, a doctor who gave me a physical in preparation for going to scout camp, a doctor who removed my plantar warts, a doctor who checked my dislocated knee, and a doctor who examined my throat and found I had both strep infection and the kissing disease, mononucleosis. These were specialists and my visits all related to crises or organizational demands. I’d go to their sterile offices, talk to them in their white lab coats, open my mouth, drop my pants, and otherwise skirt their world of science and be properly impressed. I needed their expertise I suppose but wasn’t really all that interested in what they had to say or prescribe.

I have a close friend now and who has a different relationship with doctors, whom he visits on numerous occasions for any variety of illnesses—real and imagined. My friend sees at least one or more doctors weekly and often tells me what his cardiologist or his dermatologist or his back doctor or his general practitioner or his internalist or his surgeon or some other specialist has said about his illnesses. It seems to me that beyond his own education in business and bookkeeping he has pursued a medical education in the hallowed halls of hospitals and clinics, a constant search for remedies, medicines, and knowledge to improve his day-to-day well being and treat his several conditions.

I don’t report this kind of phenomenon in my friends and acquaintances without revealing my own preoccupation with specialists for I, too, have sought knowledge from the doctors. I too have been enamored of their offerings, specialties, and diagnoses, but rather than radiologists I have visited musicologists, rather than endocrinologists I have sat at the feet of philologists, rather than chiropractologists I have preferred historiologists.

My manic phase of learning from doctors began in my late teens, reached a huge crescendo in my early thirties, and then quickly diminished (frankly a great relief to my wife at the time). My obsession slackened when I realized I had been in school for twenty-two of my thirty-three years. For more than a decade I had visited the offices, lecture halls, theaters, labs, and libraries of learning about theology, musicology, and biblioraphgy. I read dictionaries, scholarly studies, philosophies, essays, novels, short stories, periodicals, codices, and manuscripts in my pursuit of a wide variety of intellectual topics. My doctor’s names included Van Buren, Lee, Childs, Duke, and Beckelheimer, scholars who led me into the literatures of their specialties. I couldn’t read enough, hear enough, or absorb enough for years.

Finally I had had enough and nearly quite seeing them—doctors of all kinds. My decision to curtail my extravagance wasn’t because I was cured of my need to learn and know. I simply was tired of the institutions that offered the doctors’ advice—the schools with their curriculum plans, requirements, and tests. So I decided to self-medicate my need, to read on my own, to attend only seminars and workshops of interest, and eventually I gave up most of those things in order to begin writing my own essays and my own stories, a change that seems to have become my ultimate self-treatment. Forgive me if I have sinned, but for my penance just promise me not to take away my tablets, pens, or word processor.

Mea culpa.

Denver, 2013

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot