Necessary Mutilation

What an anti-climactic experience from a long-anticipated day!  Today I met with the “bariatric psychologist,” Dr. “L,” as is required.  His name itself made me expect a kindly, warm older gentleman - perhaps an ex-fat person with great compassion for those presently awash in extra weight.

Wrong!

This arrogant and insulting man without an ounce of extra weight, my age or so, was “just the facts ma’am” bland and about as jovial as dry toast.  Thankfully the sweet young woman who greeted me (and my husband, who was off work for today’s holiday and insisted on driving me) made up for his manner with her kindly candor and sense of humor.  When she set me up in the wait area to take the requisite “260 Yes-or-No-questions test” (I knew it would be the MMPI!), it immediately got me chuckling at the inanity of many of the questions; she often laughed with me from behind her desk and even commented that it is the ones who get offended at or take the questionnaire too seriously that she worries about.

As a social worker I am all too familiar with the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test, ambiguously worded on purpose to screen out lies and detect any number of possible mental health diagnoses — from psychoses to phobias to depression to narcissism.  Unfortunately, I found many questions either comical enough to read out loud (”Do you find yourself covered in gray spots when you get up in the morning?,” or something like that) to my husband (thankfully, no one else was in the waiting room!), or worded strangely with seemingly improper English (Wrongest? Baddest?).  Plus, there were those questions that cried out for “maybe” or “sometimes” options because I knew that answering yes or no would either condemn me as mentally ill or as a liar - e.g., “Have you ever stolen as a child?” (Y = Klepto Kiddie and N = Liar, as every kid steals!).

The test aside, my ensuing 45-minute meeting with Dr. Bland was similarly insufferable despite my best efforts to liven and loosen him up.  While conducting a rather transparent mental status exam on me (”Spell world.  Spell world backwards.  Where are you right now?  What day is it?”  Aack!), one of the directives was to write any sentence on a piece of paper and then hand it to him.  I wrote:  “I hope I don’t flunk this mental status exam!” which he then read without even an eyelid flutter of humor.   And as to the Q&A opportunity I had expected, the “doneness” of our process became apparent when he abruptly got up and ushered me out without even asking psychologist-like things such as, “Anything I can answer for you?” or “How are you feeling with things now?”

I must admit I selfishly feel somewhat insulted by how much this process felt all about the requirement that I be sane rather than the forum for reciprocity, questions and answers, a springboard for things to come, or whatever else I expected it to be.

Well, maybe in that sense it may have been the first step of blind compliance and trust in the system to do what it needs in my overall behalf without my thinking so much or exerting too much free will into the process.  God I suck at that!

Oh, and a last aside about today:  How startled was I to see the name of my esteemed teammate and colleague Dr. H. on the door of the room just down the hall to Dr. Bland in this office building I’d never been to before?  Both interested to see where Dr. H. hangs his shingle while in private practice opposite days to ours, and mortified at the thought of bumping into him, I peeked - but not long enough in case the door were to open.  If this isn’t a representation of my ambivalence about and inner shame over my patient role, I don’t know what is!  Pass the mental status exam indeed!