When I was growing up, if you were sick, you went to a doctor. Those were strange times. Nowadays, if you’re sick, the doctor doesn’t want to see you. I mean, you’re sick! If doctors saw sick people all day, every day, do you know what their life expectancy would be? So no; doctors only see you if you’re healthy—they call it a well visit—and then they tell you that you have stuff that there’s no physical evidence that you actually have and that you should take pills forever.

If you’re actually sick, you have to go to an emergency room or Urgent Care, which I suppose are staffed by doctors also. But your official doctors—whose names you write on forms at least once a week—don’t have to take responsibility for what those doctors say, and you never see those doctors again.

I bring this up because of a horrible, constant cough that I had in December—I still have it now, but I had it then also—that didn’t seem to be going away. So I decided to call a doctor, primarily because my brother’s aufruf was coming up that Shabbos, and I didn’t want to show up and cough the whole time and have everybody wonder whether they were going to make it to the wedding.

In the first place, I had to wait until Monday to call a doctor because if you’re sick on a Sunday, you’re on your own. It’s not that important to get healed on a weekend because who has work anyway, besides people with writing deadlines and people who have to prepare their teaching lessons and people who just want to get better on Sunday so they can go to work on Monday?

So I called the doctors’ practice first thing Monday morning, and they said, “We can see you Wednesday afternoon!” which I knew meant that even if they gave me medication, I wouldn’t be better by Shabbos.

“But you can’t see your regular doctor or any other doctor at your regular doctor building that has a hundred doctors in it. None of those doctors can see you. Your choices are a different building 20 minutes away or another building 40 minutes away,” and I said, “Um… 20 minutes away.”

I longed for the days of old when doctors made house calls, and they would show up and try to treat you with nothing but the contents of their bris milah bag and sending your spouse around the house to boil towels or whatever.

So I spent all of Monday night coughing, and Tuesday morning my wife said, “Why don’t you call Urgent Care?” which is not an idea that had occurred to me. This is why you get married.

Also, I thought they just took care of broken bones.

So I spent all of Tuesday in Urgent Care chain-sucking Ricolas and trying not to cough, and failing, and people are looking at me like, “Why are you coughing in the same room as me? Go to the doctor!”

They call it Urgent Care, but nothing there is urgent. Their goal is maybe to get you out by the end of the workday. You wait in the big room for an hour, and then they have you go into a smaller room and sit on a piece of paper, which you arguably should also have been sitting on in the waiting room, and you think, “I’m finally going to be seen!” And then it’s another hour. But at least there you can be free to cough with abandon. I hope they sterilized everything in that room when I left.

At some point, a nurse did come in, and he asked me about all my symptoms. I have one symptom. I can’t get through one sentence without coughing. You can hear that. Stop asking me so many questions. Questions make me cough.

And then, after another 20 minutes of waiting, the doctor swept in for about 10 seconds like she had somewhere else to be. Maybe it’s called Urgent Care because it’s urgent for her to be somewhere else. They are not calling in new patients as fast as she is moving. I think there’s one doctor servicing all the Urgent Cares in town, driving back and forth between patients. Either that, or she has a video game paused in the other room.

She sent me into another room for chest X-rays. After that, the X-ray technician sent me back to the little room, and the doctor breezed back in and said, “You have the beginnings of pneumonia -aaa!”

“I had a feeling!” I called after her, as she disappeared down the hall.

Anyway, the doctor prescribed an antibiotic that was supposed to kick in within 48 hours, by which we meant Thursday. For a Friday aufruf. She also prescribed a cough medicine that does absolutely nothing, but at least it tastes horrible.

So anyway, the next two days I spent taking antibiotics and wondering if they would work.

They didn’t work. I’d been misdiagnosed. I know this because I emailed my regular doctor on Friday morning.

“I don’t know what she told you,” he said. “The X-ray doesn’t show pneumonia. It’s just some virus that will go away in a few weeks.” In other words, they don’t know. It’s “some virus.” Get better on your own. That’s not why we’re here.

But I did find, during the two days that I thought I had pneumonia, that unlike with a cough, when you tell people you have pneumonia, you get a lot of sympathy. People picture pneumonia as this disease that keeps you in bed and eventually kills you. Especially people who read a lot of old stories. Like my editors. They’re big readers, these editors.

Also, in the old days, people used to just die of a cough. Or possibly from sitting in public and trying not to cough and having their heads explode.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re not feeling well, don’t go to the doctor. That’s the last place you want to go. You should probably go somewhere that you’re less likely to end up worse, such as an aufruf. At least there, people are throwing candies.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].