For many years I have been making a point of always bringing my own reading materials when I go to doctors’ offices. I do that out of a sense of self-preservation.
In so many doctors’ offices, there is a good stack of current, or at least not ancient, magazines, all of them containing two things that drive me crazy: multiple advertisements for prescription medication, and advice columns. The advertisement for prescription medication usually shows a photograph of people having the time of their lives, no indication of the malady that will be cured by the medication, and a line that would tell me to talk to my doctor about the medication. All of this would be followed by a long list of horrible things that could happen if I used the medication. This is all a huge waste of dollars, time, and paper. I will only take medication that is prescribed by my doctor, after a lengthy conversation. Even when medication is prescribed, I will invariably question if there is a real need for that medication. I come by this distrust of medication honestly.
My maternal grandfather, when asked why he had so many unopened medications in his house, said: “I go to the doctor because the doctor needs to make a living. I buy the medication that the doctor tells me to buy because the pharmacist needs to make a living. And I don’t take the medication because I want to stay alive.”
When I am faced with all the waste generated by these advertisements, I think of the Jewish concept of b’al tashchit, the law that prohibits wasteful behavior and wanton destruction. Time (mine for reading the advertisements and the doctor’s for having to answer questions that don’t really pertain to my health), the ink and the paper, the energy used to create, produce, and print those advertisements are wasted resources. These advertisements are not for me. For all these reasons my blood pressure would rise, needlessly alarming nurses and doctors.
The next frustrating moment as I read these magazines came from the advice columns. There are so many articles aiming to help me live a better life! All of them tell me that there is a silver bullet that will solve all my problems. I know that these are just there to make people like me buy magazines, hoping that whatever suggestion they are giving me will alleviate the crazy rhythm of my life. People who work and then go to the grocery store and then take their children or grandchildren to all their different activities, while not being able to pay sufficient attention to the deluge of emails that crowd the inbox, missing updates from people we love, and then cook and clean and garden and at the end of the day are so exhausted that they can barely breathe. I sat at doctors’ waiting rooms, reading articles telling me to carve time for myself, and a wave of frustration would flood me. Not because the author was wrong about the need to carve time for myself—that much, I agree, is true. It’s just that even when I decide I will do that—carve time for myself, my teenage son wants to talk, and I will talk with him, and I will put aside the novel by the new Nobel prize laureate for which I eagerly awaited my turn to read from the library, and now I have to return it, half-read. I am not sure when I will carve out time for myself when the basement floods and I have to remove everything from there so that I can have someone fix whatever is wrong. And again, by reading these advice columns, my blood pressure would rise, alarming nurses and doctors. Now you know why I bring my own reading materials to doctors’ appointments.
Here is my suggestion, dear reader: pat yourself on the back for all you accomplish on a daily basis. When you catch yourself enjoying something, smile to yourself, and consider it to be the time you “carved for yourself.” Have rachamim, compassion, for yourself. And most of all, bring your own reading materials to your appointments.