You get a scratch on your fender and while it is almost imperceptible to the naked eye, the inspection officer who is nitty-gritty because he wants to show you he is boss, fusses over that minor imperfection and insists you got to fix it before you get your clearance. Yes, car inspection has come down to that level of nitpicking absurdity.
More critical, more life and death, is the opposite that might be taking place in the medical profession where some vigilance is required by the authorities.
Example: There was once a bright doctor who studied in India and came back to open a practice in South Trinidad in the seventies and came to be known as the “stroke doctor” because of his high success rate in treating this problem which he did by managing patients’ blood pressure.
Unfortunately, Doc, saw every problem from the perspective that it was related to one’s BP; so if you twisted your ankle and had a sprain, he ignored that problem, took your pressure and gave you medication for your BP; if you got diarrhea, he just said it was your pressure responsible and that was his treatment for it.
You come to realise that “stroke doctor” has been left behind in this world where medicine is on fast forward, where google has trivialised all the voodoo-type practices of the folkloric past. Good as he was, he was never daring enough to be experimental, to try something else; thus, with just giving you a CDAP prescription he is hesitant – if the painkiller he gives you you give one to your spouse he sees that as something felonious.
But he is not the only problem as he has a foreign-born wife who feels she is a Tamil Tiger and who struts through the office rearranging the patients’ list interfering with the order of who is next thus if next in line is some woman dressed to kill, she removes them from next to next to last. This cantankerous meddlesome hag is obviously high on illegal substances and feel locals here should be treated as she determines when in fact authorities should investigate her job spec, at least.
Lester Orie
