You
Can’t Even Get Diagnosed
We Have
Run Out of Diagnoses
Daily Observer
Lapius struggled into the house, wiped the summer
sweat from his brow, staggered to the medicine cabinet and extracted a bottle
of fine scotch. Scotch alone would cure
his staggers, a condition brought on, he confided in me, by tensions of the
outer world.
“How was your day?”
I asked. He glared malevolently.
“The country is in terrible trouble, Harry---“
“That can be cured only by spiritus fermenti,” I
completed the sentence.
“No it won’t cure the country, but it will soften my
reaction to it.” He sipped and sighed,
and sat down heavily in the wing chair.
“
Then I stopped at the stationers for some manila
folders, but they were out of them.
‘Back order for two months’ they told me. I enquired about the new desk I had
purchased. ‘Possibly December. Walnut is hard to get. Matter of fact a walnut tree is worth about
$15,000. If you have any walnut trees
you better put a burglar alarm on them.’”
Lapius stopped only to long enough to down the scotch
in one measured dose. “We don’t have any
walnut trees, do we Harry?”
I assured him we didn’t.
“Then I asked for a refill for my ballpoint pen, and
they told me that the manufacturer had discontinued the line. Here I had wasted almost an hour of precious
time and had accomplished zilch.
However, I still had to go to the bank to arrange for a loan. But Dillingham met me at the front door, and
turned me away. ‘Sorry Lapius,’ he
said. We’ve run out of money. But it’s only temporary, you understand. Come back next month.’”
“Wow. That
sounds like a hard day,” I sympathized.
“That’s only the beginning, Harry.”
“How could it get any worst?”
“The office,” he murmured diffidently, a man clearly
beaten down by events.
“How could it be worse at the office?” I asked.
“After all, a physician’s office is his bastion. Nothing can be allowed to go wrong at the
office.”
“That’s what I always thought, Harry, but I was
wrong. When I got to the office
Persephine, my secretary met me in tears.”
“’What’s troubling you?’ I asked, ‘surely it can’t be
that time of the month again, so soon.’”
“’It’s not that at all,’ she whined, ‘It’s that our
supplies haven’t arrived.’
“’Is that all that’s bothering you?’ I said,
chummying her a little to make her feel better.
‘Care not. We’ll make do. We have spare scissors, gauze, alcohol, cotton
balls. After all it isn’t the first time
we’ve been caught short.’”
‘It’s not that,’ she cried, ‘it’s the diagnoses. They were supposed to be here last week. Then when they didn’t arrive we were promised
that they would be here definitely today.
But I called the company and they said there would be a slight delay.’
‘The diagnosis!
You mean we are all out of diagnoses?
Impossible. I had a closet full
last week.’
‘I know,’ she whinnied loyally, ‘but we were so busy,
you used them all up. There are only
three or four left, mostly liver and kidney, and you know how seldom you need
those.’
‘Check again,’ I ordered firmly. ‘Surely there must be a few heart and lung
and ear, nose and throat diagnoses around.’
She shook her head.
‘Not a one. I’ve already
checked. The Diagnostic Corporation told
us that if you would be willing to pay double fees, they could hand deliver a
few of their spares to tide you over.
But that’s the best they could do.’
“I agreed to the invidious blackmail Harry. What else could I do? Within an hour their truck rolled up and they
delivered a pitifully small array of diagnoses, under armed guard. I should have opened the package before he
left. I would have returned them. Look what the sent me, a medulloblastoma, a
pheochromocytoma, and erythema multiforme bullosum, and a lupus erythematosis.”
“What a crazy assortment. You wouldn’t use those in your office
practice in a million years. What will
you do, send them back?”
“No. I’ll keep
them around for some clinical-pathological conferences we have at the
hospital. But lo and behold, who was
seated in my waiting room, but Dillingham the bank president. I ushered him into my examining room. His face was puffy, he could scarcely talk,
he kept pointing to his throat. I peered
in and saw the reddened most infected tonsils I’d seen in ages.
‘Sorry, old man,’ I said to him, ‘you’ve sure got
lousy looking tonsils but I can’t help you.
You see, I’ve run out of diagnoses.
“He grasped his throat. ‘You’ve got to help me. I’m strangling, I can’t eat.’
‘I’d sure like to help you, old man, but it’s out of
my hands.’
‘Can’t you just give me some penicillin?’ he
gasped.
‘Not without a diagnosis. You wouldn’t want me to treat you blindly,
would you? He shook his head. ‘Just put some ice on your neck and call me
next week.’
‘I’ll be dead by next week.’
“Amazing, Lapius,” I said. “Whatever happened to the diagnoses to make
them in such short supply?”
“Well, as I explained to Dillingham, when the dollar
dropped, the Germans and Japanese to say nothing of the French, found they
could buy our diagnoses cheaply. They
bought several billion dollars worth and left us on the ropes, diagnostically
that is.”
“So the day was a total loss,” I said.
“Not completely,” Lapius replied, lighting a
cigar. “The president of the bank said
that if I could treat his tonsillitis he thought he might squeeze my loan out
of the bank. So I gave him some
penicillin and got the loan.”
“But I thought you said you didn’t have any diagnoses
left.”
“I didn’t. But
then Dillingham was the one who made diagnosis.
He called it tonsillitis. It
seems that his bank had bought some diagnoses cheap with Eurodollars. They helped corner the market and create the
shortage of diagnoses and drive the domestic price up. As it turned out, the president of the bank
now owns most of the diagnoses in the area.”
“What is he going to do with them?”
“Probably use them to become a member of the board of
trustees at the hospital.”