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I have been a little under the weather lately, so I made an appointment with my doctor.

Doctor’s visits are tricky things. While they are necessary evils adventures, they also tend to leave nothing to the imagination by the time they are through with you.

While living in many locations in my lifetime, I find it essential to search for a new doctor too often. Given my age and a doctor’s neurotic compulsion to poke and prod, I do not take the task frivolously.

This is a lesson I learned after my first doctor. He was tall, an athlete, and had extremely large hands (‘big’ mistake #1). After my first prostate exam, I looked up at the doctor and said, “I did not care for that at all.”

He looked back at me said, “I didn’t care too much for it myself, Tim.” Hmm . . . I had not thought of that.

The next city in which I lived, I first did a little investigating. After all, I now knew that if they are making a line of men for prostate exams, I want to go to the rear back of the line. This time I found a family doctor who possessed, much to my delight, small hands.

However, when told to bend over the examination table, a dark cloud came into the room. Maybe because he was small of stature, he felt he had something to prove to this tall Swede.

While doing his best imitation of “The Case of the Missing Hand”, I turned my head around and said, “Doc, if you push any further, you are going to be in front of me.” Nuff said. He had small hands, butt I aslo believe he had a mean streak.

Currently with a doctor I like, the result is still the same . . . I lose. After another such exam, I jokingly told him, “I worry about people like you who do such things for a living.”

“Tim, you have nothing to worry about unless I step outside for a smoke.”

Picking up the on the theme, I inject, “But you gave me no flowers, no nice dinner . . . no nothing!”

We laughed so hard the nurse came in to check on the two of us.

Though prostate exams are extremely important, and I still visit the doctor on an annual basis, I am still a little bun gun shy. I break out into a sweat every time I see someone pull on a rubber glove or I hear a backup beeper.