Dr. Millenium Pepsodent*



No, this isn't really him, just a reasonable facsimile.

One fine day in Mount Sinai, a young man in a white labcoat wandered into my room. We chatted for a while and we just hit it off. His name was Dr. Millenium Pepsodent.* He was Puerto Rican so we obviously came from extremely diverse backgrounds, but somehow we had a lot in common. He sat down and we talked about our respective depressions and how we both felt that we had messed up our lives. "But you're a doctor!", I said, "and if you're practicing at Mt. Sinai, apparently a good one, and a successful one, too." He explained that he's been depressed as long as he could remember. He got really lousy grades in college and ultimately wound up going to Guadalajara, Mexico, one of the real cesspools of the medical school world. I told him that I heard that in Guadalajara you had to run around in the street to catch your own dogs to experiment on. We had a great time just shooting the breeze. I said that when (if?) I got out of the hospital we should go get a cup of coffee or maybe a beer. He said that the supermarkets in Mexico only sell liquor till 3:00 PM so after that he had to do his drinking in bars. But the bars close at 2:00 AM, so after that he had to resort to drinking rubbing alcohol. When I asked him if it was dangerous he said no, and that it kinda tasted like vodka. So he thought he might have been just a tad out of control, and that was why he had stopped drinking. I thought that that had been an excellent decision. This was the guy that asked the following day to be my attending physician. I knew I was in good hands. In all the time I knew Millenium, I think he performed exactly one medical procedure on me. He took arterial blood for blood gases. I was beginning to think he was an imposter who wandered in through the emergency room. He came to see me a few more times after that and sat down, put his feet up on my bed and shmoozed with me. Sometimes it was actually about my illness. I liked him a lot. Despite being quite disturbed, he was extremely bright and actually had pretty much my twisted sense of humor. He gave me his cell phone number and we vowed to keep in touch when (if?) I ever got reasonably healthy. I wasn't sure that he was an actual doctor until I got home from the hospital and found a copy of the bill that he had sent to Oxford for some obscene amount for sitting and entertaining me. Am I too old to go to medical school?

*Definitely NOT his real name!