I bit my lip when I was eating a pizza slice back in early October. My mouth started bleeding. I tasted blood, and the bite was painful. The pain lasted for a few weeks but went away after a month. The sore didn’t heal. I kept chewing it that whole time out of a nervous, unconscious habit, probably in my sleep, too, when I wasn’t aware of course.
The sore turned white like most mouth sores and blistered up. I looked in the mirror up close at it this week and saw a hole in the middle. It appeared yellow as if it was infected, so I made a mental note to drive to urgent care on Friday.
The drive there was less than a mile from my apartment in the middle of the afternoon. I expected a long wait like every other time at urgent care, but I got there to find myself alone to my surprise. Good. The visit would be quicker than I initially thought. That was the good news.
A nurse opened the door and called my name. I followed him inside with my backpack. He wore navy blue nurse scrubs and a matching face mask when he led me to a patient room.
“You’ll be in room four,” he said.
Oh, room four. I was hoping room three. Oh well.
He let me in and pointed me to a seat, the only seat, in that small exam room as if there were a dozen other seats in there. “You’re going to sit in that seat,” he said.
As opposed to what?
“I’ll take your blood pressure.”
The norm at urgent care. I could’ve gone in with a sprained wrist, and they still would’ve taken my blood pressure.
He stuck a little plastic clamp on my left forefinger and wrapped a velcro sleeve around my left arm before pressing buttons on the blood pressure machine. “So why are you here?” he asked.
I was embarrassed to tell him at a place called urgent care that I was there because of a mouth sore, not like my ears were bleeding.
He typed my answer into a desktop computer across that little room. “What medications are you currently taking?”
I told him which ones, although I struggled to remember all of them since I took a lot.
“What’s your pharmacy?” he asked.
I told him that as well, but he had trouble finding it in his search base at first. “The doctor will be in shortly,” he said. “Stay there.”
Like I was going anywhere.
I expected to sit there and worry for another half hour. But the door opened not five minutes later. Thank God. The bad news was when the doctor stepped in. He was another man in scrubs, my doctor for the day, looking to be in his early thirties. Whatever happened to old doctors like when I was young? All doctors used to wear a white coat and have silver hair with a stethoscope around their necks after so many decades in their fields. This guy looked like a personal trainer who’d snuck into urgent care after spotting someone doing squats at the local gym. All that was missing was a red clown nose and a rubber chicken in his pocket. But his face was gravely serious.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. Didn’t he look at my chart?
“I have a mouth sore that hasn’t gone away.”
He got up close to me. “Let me see,” he said.
I pulled my lower lip down to show him.
He examined it for fewer than five seconds and sat in a chair across the room from me. My hope was waning. He looked at me contemptuously. “How long has it been there?” he asked.
“I lost count of the weeks,” I said. “I bit it like in early October. And I keep biting it because of my anxiety.”
“Well, stop biting it,” he said.
“Okay?”
“It’s not going to heal if you keep biting it.”
Thanks, Doc, for your expertise analysis.
“What do you suggest I do?” I asked.
“Try mouthwash or Chlorhexidine your dentist prescribed, or gargle salt and warm water.”
That was all he told me. He wouldn’t write me up for an antibiotic or anything.
“That’s it?” I said. “What if it’s infected?”
He stood up and got close to me again. “Let me see again?”
Wasn’t the first three-second observation enough? I pulled my lower lip down once more, and he observed closer before he sat back in the chair. “You got to let it heal.”
My hope dropped like a dead pigeon. “What about a biopsy?” I said.
“Wait two or three weeks, and if it doesn’t go away, see an ear, nose, and throat specialist or your dentist.”
An ear, nose, and throat specialist? Where did my mouth figure into that equation?
He opened the door to let me out, and that was that.
I left urgent care without anything accomplished. At least the visit was less than an hour, the only positive takeaway.
Let me reiterate how disappointed I am with the modern medical world, which used to be more caring, more professional. Somewhere along the line, the patients started arriving on conveyor belts, and doctors started ringing them up like Ralph’s cashiers. Now one of the Kennedys might be in charge. I still wasn’t sure if that man was even a doctor.
Speaking of Ralph’s, I drove there and bought Morton’s Natural Sea Salt to take with warm water as directed. Nothing else has helped. I guess I’ll try not to bite my lip to avoid seeing my awful dentist again in hopes this sore will heal up. An urgent care bill will probably appear in my mailbox, charging me eight hundred dollars like the one back in August when I couldn’t feel my hand. The ER doctor didn’t do so much as even touch me, let alone use a machine on me.
