My Podiatrist is Too Good-Looking
The problem with shows like Grey’s Anatomy is that now really good looking people think they can go into medicine. It used to be a profession closed to them. But thanks to McDreamy and Katherine Hiegl and the rest of them, with their Breck girl hair cascading around the neckline of a pair of scrubs and a never ending and inexplicable series of occasions in which doctors have to take their shirts off at work (revealing an unheard-of number of abs), great looking people have an example of themselves as doctors. And from that example they pursued medicine with wild abandon. Representation matters.
So now, gorgeous people could be your healthcare providers. And it is dangerous.
Take my recent visit to a podiatrist. I got this podiatrist’s name from a neighborhood message board where many many people said he was “the best” and “I love him.”
I thought—Great! He’s in-network on my insurance and he’s within 5 miles of my house (the main criteria I ask of a provider). I made an appointment.
I got my x-rays done by a technician and then awaited the podiatrist in an examining room. The second he entered I thought there had been a mistake.
“Sorry, I’m here for the foot doctor,” I said, thinking he was a human scrubs mannequin who’d wandered into the wrong room.
“Yep! That’s me,” the living Ken doll replied.
“Oh. Well, I need a podiatrist for human feet. Not adorable Bijon Frise feet. We’re talking bunions and some weird injury I got walking on the beach barefoot. There’s swelling that has sort of fused two toes into one serpentine thing.”
“Let’s take a look!” Malibu Podiatrist said eagerly, plopping his too-hot bod onto a too-short stool.
And this is where his looks really became an impediment. Because you do not want to show your misaligned, Hobbit-y, chipped-polished feet to a great looking person, no matter how nicely framed their degrees are on the wall. I tried to squirm, to say, “Maybe I overreacted to having pain with every step. I can just go on hopping on one foot. It’ll be totally awesome; like I’m a human pogo stick.”
But he reached for my feet and pressed and prodded and asked questions like a normal podiatrist. Like this was a totally typical doctor visit. I tried not to look at his face and to answer him in identifiable words. I could not look at him: sometimes when people are too good-looking it’s like they circle back to being repulsive. Like, it hurts to look at a too hot person.
But also with excessively attractive people you both can’t look at them and also have to inspect them. Like, what is going on here? Why are you SO good-looking??? What’s happening with your jaw? And your ears--why are they so good? So then you’re stuck in a look at them/don’t look at them cycle of neck spasms.
There was a lot of talk of surgeries from him that were “inevitable” and in my “near future”. I got the sense I was in the middle of an upselling situation (ala The Gap’s, “Do you want socks with that?” except, you know, surgery.) But I nodded and agreed that I was game for surgery, anytime, anyplace. We agreed to “monitor the situation on my left bunion” and I left with a healing plan and booked a follow-up visit.
When I got home, my husband asked, “So what activities are you supposed to avoid?”
“Oh, I… I don’t know.”
“He didn’t tell you?” my husband asked, already skeptical of the American medical establishment and growing more so.
“No, I… didn’t ask?”
“Well, what about footwear? What are you supposed to be wearing?”
“I didn’t ask that either?” I said, realizing I’d been put under a spell and was unable to advocate for myself (or my foot) in that podiatrist’s hunky presence.
“What happened on that visit? What is he going to do about you not being able to walk??” My husband was working himself into a frothy lather, thinking about a wasted co-pay and his wife being misdiagnosed.
So you see, Dr. ChiselFace With Flingable Blond Hair (like really? What are you, a surfer podiatrist??), you are not suited to medicine in America. Take your good looks and your education and experience and go practice in Sweden. They can handle your face there. Or Portugal, where too-hot men just walk the streets willy nilly.
That kind of thing is not for America. Our gene pool is too messed up. Our feet are weird and funky. And we have questions about webbed toes we just can’t ask you.