Finding a New Doctor Feels Like Dating

I need to find someone out of the blue who I trust with my body — and it’s a daunting task.

Image by Anne Karakash from Pixabay

There are two kinds of people who see and touch my naked body: lovers and doctors.

So when I got an email from my doctor’s office saying they may no longer accept my health insurance, it felt like a break-up.

“Oh, no,” I thought to myself. “I have to put myself back out there.”

It had taken me years to find a doctor I trusted, a doctor with whom I was comfortable seeing and touching my body, a doctor I could verbally open up to about the ways my body does— and doesn’t — function.

It’s one thing to be vulnerable and exposed with a lover, when the goal is pleasure and bonding. It’s quite another to be vulnerable and exposed in a well-lit doctor’s office, laying on a table covered in paper, being poked and prodded with instruments and machines and hands and fingers.

I’ve had relationships with women last less time than the one I’ve got with my doctor. And my doctor knew far more about my body than those partners ever did.

So now I might be out there again, looking, screening, hoping to find the one. The one I can talk to. The one who will listen to me. The one I can trust. The…