Chair Up and other tales of a Chair that refused to budge !

My Clinic

Apart from blogging, pretending to be singing on the Youtube and whiling away my time on the Facebook, I also work as a Doctor in my spare time. I work with a modest private hospital during day time and run an even more modest Clinic close to my home in the evenings. Since I am allergic to hard-work, I limit my working hours to 7:30 AM to 4:00 PM at hospital and 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM in my Clinic.

I refuse to entertain people after 8:00 PM simply because I believe in spending some time with my family when I am alive. This has earned me the wrath of some people and some of them have branded me arrogant and rude. I think I have to live with that. I can't risk being a guilt laden 75 year-old with pots of money, a lot of illnesses and repentance about not having spent enough time with my loved ones.

This story isn't about me, it is about that black chair in the corner in my Clinic. This place is very small and a little over-crowded with unavoidable furniture. There is the examination table that also doubles up as a cup-board to keep my books. The black chair to seat the patient [henceforth referred to as client]. The blue chair is obviously mine and the table. Apart from these, there is a large Almira in the opposite corner and another plastic chair to seat the bystander.

It is necessary to give this long description because the place where the black chair sits becomes the crux of the matter. I make the clients sit on the black chair, so that I can check the vitals like Blood Pressure and do a clinical examination of the upper part of the body. If a complete examination is required, I use the examination table right next to the chair.

The place where I keep the chair is exactly the place from where the client can extend the arm and rest it on the table to record the BP. I can move to and fro to do the examination. This is the most ideal place in the given scenario. But somehow, people have different ideas and this is where the real story begins.

In the early days, the clients coming in would first pull the black chair almost into the gap between the writing table and the examination table and make the proceedings really difficult. This was becoming a real nuisance for me. It put added burden on my back and even made them uncomfortable. But somehow people have their own point of view and they have to change things according to that.

Most of the times, I used to politely request the client to get up, keep the chair back in the corner and proceed with my job. But the same exercise can get on your nerves, especially when repeated several  times on a given day or when the same person repeats the same act every time.

Gradually my patience began to wear thin. I started asking people not to move the chair, but to sit where the chair was placed. Often they would sit through the examination and as soon as I began writing the notes and prescription, they would immediately move the chair to their favored destination. This became exasperating and I had to force people to go back to the corner.

Sometimes, I would jokingly ask people, "From where do you come ?". The answer could be any place. My next quip would be this, "You come from almost 6 km distance. Coming this far and then walking from the gate, can't you cover this small distance between this table and the chair ? Why do you want to move it ? Why can't you come and sit where it is ?".

With younger people I have a slightly different way. I tell them, "Don't you dare to pull the chair. It has a mind of its own and it will get extremely angry if you pull it around. It can even bite you if you provoke it. So let it be where it is. You just sit there".

At some point, I came to understand why the people moved the chair around. The truth is, nobody likes to be cornered. People perhaps felt as if they were being pinned down to a chair at gun point. But unfortunately, I couldn't help in any way. I just don't have the space to make people feel they were centered. That is when I discovered a better way to keep the chair from moving. I kept the front right leg of the chair pressed firmly with my left leg to prevent people from dragging it. This is how the next level of fun began.

A middle aged lady came in one day and as usual, pulled the chair. Since I  had firmly pinned it to the corner, it didn't budge. But this was a stubborn lady and she pulled it with all the power and it still didn't move. She looked furious and asked, "Why isn't this chair moving ? Where am I going to sit ?"  I calmly told her, "Why don't you sit where the chair is ? I haven't asked for any help to move my furniture here". She was sheepish but still had not understood how it became immobile and asked, "But why isn't it moving ?". Some diehard that was !

Another man tried the same thing. Since the chair was not moving, he asked me, "Doctor, get up and move from there. This chair isn't moving. Let me fix it !". My goodness, how I kept myself from falling off the chair is still a mystery to me. I told him, "Let it remain that way. What is the need to move it ? It is convenient for me to examine you if you could make yourself comfortable here". He nodded and said, "Oh, yes. That is true" and promptly pulled the chair to the gap between two tables because I had for a moment left it unguarded !

A young but hefty lady is the next in this saga. She went on pulling the chair even as I asked her to sit down right there. A momentary lapse in my concentration and the chair had escaped from the trap. What I saw next was the lady was flat on the the examination table with the chair in her hand with one of its legs precariously close to my right eye. And her own left leg was on my writing table. To make matters worse, my nurse was absconding that day. I leave it to the imagination of people to decide what a task it must have been to untangle a young lady weighing above 70 kilos from that situation.

One of the funniest characters ever sat on the chair without any complaint. But when I asked him to turn around to examine his back, he promptly did so. But he did so not before turning the chair along with him. This left me with the really daunting task of examining the back-rest of the chair.

Still crazier was another young lady. When I asked her to turn around, she actually turned to her right. Now take a look at the picture and imagine how she could have turned to her right and what she would have done to me. She was wearing saree but had no inhibition in lifting her right leg over my left thigh and in seconds, she was sitting with my left knee between her legs. Sindhu, my nurse couldn't forget that spectacle and kept winking off and on for quite a few days.

One of the problems of narrating real life incidents on blog is the fun is often diluted in scripting and most of the dialogues get lost in translation. Before it becomes totally impossible for the reader to sit through this, let me call it a day for this 'Saga' !


Dr. Punned-it