Medical History Forms

Next to reading information pamphlets about obscure diseases and drinking water from paper cones, my favorite thing to do in a doctor's office waiting room is to fill out medical history forms.

What I like even better than filling out the ten-page get-to-know-you-and-your-diseased-ancestors questionnaire that the Dermatology Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital hands out is filling out the same form every single I visit the clinic, which happens to be about every three months.



At my most recent visit on Monday, I decided to make things easy on myself and wrote "N/A" at the top of each of page and drew a line down to the bottom.

"We really need you to fill this out," the nurse told me when I got to the exam room.

I declined on account that I consider questions about pacemakers and numbness in my limbs to be irrelevant to the Crohn's Disease-induced rash on my neck. All I wanted was a pill to make it go away, but I would settle for a topical cream or a strong animal tranquilizer.

By the time the doctor came in to see me, I had already decided out of principle (what principle, I'm not entirely sure) to plead the Fifth on every question asked of me. I was willing, however, to put principle aside if the good doctor was willing to part with a little personal information of her own. In particular, I wanted to know where she got the gigantic diamond on her left hand (new since my last visit), plus who gave it to her and when.

Unfortunately, my doctor isn't a bargaining kind of woman, nor is she as free with stories about her personal life as I would prefer.

"You still don't have any metal devices implanted anywhere in your body?" she asked, ignoring my questions about her upcoming nuptials.

I shook my head and looked out the window.

"Are you on any medications?" she continued.
I gave her a blank stare.

"The last time you visited us, you were on six," she said flatly.

I shrugged my shoulders. If she wasn't going to tell me where she was going on her honeymoon or if her wedding dress was strapless or off-the-shoulder, I wasn't going to tell her about the new medication I was taking.

Just when I thought that I had frustrated the physician to her breaking point, the doctor dropped a bomb on me. "I can't write you a prescription for that rash," she said, pencil and prescription pad in hand, "Until I know if you have experienced any unexplained weight gain or loss in the past three months."

I may be a little slow to the draw, but I know a trap when I see one. If I answered this question, I was pretty certain that an inquiry about the date of the first day of my last menstrual cycle would follow.

Out of 'principle,' I decided that I can live with the rash a little while longer, even if it means that people will continue to mistake my throat for a cat's scratching post.

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P.S. Thanks for the suggestions of how to get rid of my unwanted house guests, but they may be unnecessary. Yesterday, the fifth grader who lives in the house behind mine told me that she is trying to talk her mom into buying her a small rodent for her birthday, preferably a hamster or hairless gerbil. I asked her if would like a mouse with superpowers instead and her eyes lit up with excitement. "If you can catch it, you can keep it," I told her. The girl is thrilled beyond belief with the possibility of owning a magical beast. The girl's mother: not so much.