"Medicine is not a science!"

I don't really trust doctors. I mean, I don't believe they're all quacks, but sometimes they're a little too confident.

Last week, I stretched and accidentally stuck my left hand in my ridiculously low ceiling fan, which was humming away full-blast. It smacked me right at the base of my index and middle fingers and I was sure I'd cracked at least one of them. I spent 4 hours in the ER. The doctor never came back to tell me the results of my x-rays. Instead, a nurse came in with my discharge papers, and that's how I found out I had a bone contusion (bruise).

Imagine my surprise when the ER called me today to tell me I had a hairline crack at the tip of my thumb! Surprising because it took them so long to inform me of this, and also because the fan didn't hit my thumb! Like, at all. The thumb was not involved in any way, shape or form. I told the physician's assistant who called me that I had no pain in my thumb and that it had never even been injured. "Are you sure?" she asked me. Yup, pretty sure. I even poked and prodded my thumb a little bit to make sure I hadn't missed something.



Now I'm wondering if maybe I did, indeed, crack one of my other fingers.

The doctors at the hospital I was taken to after my car accident in 2001 didn't seem to know an x-ray from a View-Master slide. First, my left knee looked like it was broken. Then, it didn't. Then, it did. Finally, the doctors said "screw it" and stuck me in a leg immobilizer, no cast. When I told them my left pinky finger didn't hurt, but I couldn't move it, they told me to "give it 2 weeks." Well, I gave it 2 weeks and finally went to an orthopedic surgeon who informed me that I'd severed a tendon and would need surgery, and HOPEFULLY I'd still be able to use that finger because I'd waited so long to get it checked out.

This is a View-Master, kids. We didn't always have smartphones.

Tomorrow, I'm going to the dentist to contend with an infected wisdom tooth. Yeah, I know, I'm a little old to be dealing with wisdom teeth. Most people get those yanked out long before their 36th birthday. I ignored mine until they started hurting - the one on the bottom right is killin' me. I'm a little nervous, and by "a little" I mean Gorbachev-trying-to-figure-out-how-to-fix-Chernobyl nervous. I fear the pain. I fear the awful cracking sound that accompanies roots being ripped out of your skull.

Honestly, I fear the dentist yanking the wrong tooth, because nothing surprises me anymore.