About 6 weeks ago I got a nasty cut on my hand from a garbage can lid, and it still hadn't healed, so I went to the doctor today. This was my first visit to a General Practitioner MD in a good 10 years (I'd been to some of Kaiser's not-really-a-doctor "nurse practitioners", but not a real MD). From my doctor's name, Dolgonos, I was expecting someone Hispanic, but no, she was Russian! With a degree from a Soviet medical school and everything! And she was quite nice, and was actually concerned about my well-being, a major change from shake-your-hand-write-a-prescription-and-shove-you-out-the-door Kaiser.

I'd already pulled out a small splinter, and was afraid that there was more stuck in the wound. The doctor took a look at my hand and agreed, it looked like there was something in there. She got a spray bottle of some kind of cold stuff to numb the skin, and had the nurse standing by with some anesthesia, but it wasn't necessary. She cut into the wound and pulled out a piece of glass about the size of a sesame seed! There was only a little bit of blood, and it didn't hurt all that much. She wrote me a prescription for some antibiotics, and insisted that I get a tetanus shot.

The shot wasn't that bad, not nearly as bad as my last tetanus shot about 15 years ago, which hurt like hell. This was barely a pinprick. I'm wondering if I shouldn't have gotten a flu shot at the same time.