Wesley Phillips, GPC Student

My Friend David

“An apple a day keeps the doctors away.” That is a statement that was heard ever since he was old enough to talk. Unfortunately it turned out to be far from the truth for a good friend of mine. David has disliked going to doctors ever since he can remember his mother uttering those words and, as it turns out, he had a very good reason to not want to go. Almost every time he goes to visit a doctor, David has a new health problem that gets diagnosed. Medical conditions seem to stack up on him, one upon another without end. Sometimes David feels like a higher power is thumbing through a great big book of medical ailments, and stops randomly to assign some new malady for David’s doctor to chase down.

The visit to the doctor’s office that started it all happened in 1998 when he was diagnosed with an overwhelmingly painful condition known as appendicitis. When he groggily stirred in the recovery room after the emergency surgery, he was warned by the surgeon that he had high blood pressure during the surgery, which was not normal. The doctors told David that it was imperative that they find out what was causing the elevated blood pressure levels, so David made an appointment to see another doctor after he recovered from the surgery that had so recently saved his life.

At the visit to the new doctor’s office David went on a run through the hospital, having test after painful medical test performed. Each test yielded clues as to the cause, and let the doctor know which test to try next. The last test performed involved an overnight stay at the hospital in order to prepare David. The test was called a kidney biopsy, and it showed that a kidney disease caused David’s high blood pressure. This meant that David had to be careful about the types of food that he consumed, and that he had to return to the doctor’s office every six months to have his condition monitored for changes.

At the first six-month monitoring appointment, David informed the doctor that he always felt tired. Another round of exhaustive medical testing culminated with a sleep study, during which David had a multitude of uncomfortable wires connected all over his body to a set of machines that watched, and listened to David while he slept. When the doctor examined all of the data that had been collected by the machines that had silently stood sentry over David as he slept, the doctor determined that David had a condition that caused David to stop breathing at night, called “sleep apnea.” The doctor decided that surgery on David’s nose and throat to straighten a deviated septum, and to remove the tonsils, the uvula, and excess soft tissue in the throat was the best solution to this new problem. Just one year after the surgery however, the sleep apnea returned and David felt just as fatigued as he had before the surgery.

The second monitoring appointment showed that there had been no change in David’s condition but at the third six-month monitoring appointment, David slowly limped into the doctor’s office, favoring his left leg. When the doctor asked him what was wrong, David replied that there was an excruciating pain in his big toe, like he had broken it, but David knew that he had not injured the toe. The doctor looked at the toe for several seconds, gingerly touching and bending the affected toe. When the doctor finished examining the toe, he stood and simply stated that his toe was not broken, but that David had gout. The doctor told David that the pain would come at random times and was caused by a buildup of toxins in his body that were normally filtered by the kidneys. There was nothing that could be done for David, as the treatments that the doctor could prescribe would further damage David’s already weakened kidneys.

One day several months later on a hot and humid summer day, the sun beating down without mercy, David was working outside replacing a neighbor’s wooden deck. David wasn’t drinking enough water and after several hours of heavy labor, he collapsed into a heap and was rushed to the hospital. The problem, as it turned out, was a relatively minor case of heat exhaustion. The emergency room physician took some blood samples and gave David fluids intravenously. When the blood tests came back from the laboratory, dangerously high levels of potassium were shown to be present in the blood, which can cause a heart attack. David was given drugs to absorb the potassium and then he was whisked up to the intensive care section of the hospital, where he spent the next three days under close observation by the nursing staff.

Over David’s lifetime he as consumed countless bushels of apples. Every so often switching the type of apple he eats, since the last one didn’t work. With the multitude of conditions that David has, though, it appears that he has not found the right apple to eat. David has an appointment coming up in a month to visit the doctor yet again, and David has just switched to Granny Smith apples. Maybe David will have to cross the Granny Smith apple off of his list and move on to the next one, namely Red Delicious. As the reality of his situation sets in, David may begin to realize that eating apples is all a vain attempt to ward off the visits he makes to the doctor’s office. Sometimes David wonders if there are any problems left for him to become afflicted with. What could possibly be the next malady that will befall him? Will that higher power ever close the book, leaving David to cope with the problems that have already been visited upon him? Only time and his future visits to his physician’s office will tell.