Dr. McFlurry

It surprises me when people in the medical field are not the perfect picture of health. I know it's unfair. "They're just normal people who enjoy helping others", you'll say. But I'm not questioning their noble intentions. I'm questioning their self awareness.

I have a hard time figuring out how people whose place of employment, designed to let everyone know just how much they've neglected their bodies, fail to pick up on some things. You could look at my maturing muffin top and say I'm throwing stones from the porch of my glass house, but I'm a student. My colleagues are binge drinkers and date rapists. Walking the halls of school I'm bombarded with images of ill health and adults wearing sweatpants in the afternoon. This behavior could do nothing but bolster the body image of anyone who shaves on a regular basis. Hospitals I assume are different. Patients of course are in there for something gone wrong, but I feel there should be stark contrast between someone in need of help and those helping.

This charming hypocritical quality of mine was on full display the day my wife and I picked our son's pediatrician. We were new to the hospital, so we had no one referred to us. The only thing we had to assist us in picking a doctor was a series of headshots posted outside the Pediatrics Department. We looked at the portraits of all the possible doctors to choose from and started crossing them out like teenage girls scanning the yearbook for anyone that didn't "fit in" to our narrow image of what a doctor of children should look like.

We were thorough, "I don't like her eyebrows, she looks grumpy", "He doesn't look much older than us", "That hair is ridiculous", and so on. Credentials were completely ignored, we were basing our decision solely on what TV dramas have taught us about great doctors. Mainly, the less attractive they are, the meaner and more likely to get fired for malpractice they were. Under these strict guidelines it was only natural that anyone with a double chin was quickly ruled out.

Having an overweight doctor was particularly problematic for me. Our son is big. He's in the one hundredth percentile for children his age and at two weeks, weighs in at eleven pounds and twelve ounces. It was hard for me to imagine someone with a weight problem objectively examining our son who, I have no doubt, will end up obese like the majority of his classmates. I could only imagine the check-ups going one of two ways. Either struggling with weight himself, the doctor will disregard my son's weight problem as "big bones", or warning us that we watch his weight, I will get defensive, lose my cool and shout, "You're one to talk fatboy!" We eventually settled on a slim middle aged doctor of average looks and nice eyes. We've so far been happy with our shallow decision making.