Let me tell you a story… the year was 1978. I was 27 and I was joining the Peace Corps. I had been given an assignment in Western Samoa. As part of the recruitment process I was required to complete an Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station (AFEES) physical.
This is the same physical you had to take when joining the military.
I reported to AFEES and proceeded to take the tests with a group of men undergoing testing for joining the military. At one point we were in a large room, standing in a row with our feet on a white line painted on the floor. A doctor on a wheeled stool proceeded to wheel down the line, stopping in front of each of us. We dropped our shorts, strained our bowels, turned our heads and coughed as the doctor felt and prodded our groins.
When my turn came the doctor told me to turn and cough, he prodded a bit, and then repeated this several times. He then looked at me, pointed to a bench and told be to sit over there.
When he was done examining the others, he called me into his office and asked me if I knew I had an hernia. Well, this was news to me.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to get to go into the Peace Corps with a hernia, so I called my doctor and ended up getting an exam by a surgeon at Kaiser Permenente. The procedure was the same; drop the shorts, turn and cough, etc. Like the other doctor he repeated this several times, and then went and got two other doctors. They too examined me.
The three of them then went to a corner of the room and consulted with each other. The surgeon came back and said that they all agreed that there was something going on but that they were not sure it was a hernia.
He suggested that they “cut me open” and see what it was. If it was an hernia, then they would repair it. If not, then they would figure out what it was and if possible, deal with it.
Okay I said, since I wanted to go into the Peace Corps. He consulted his schedule and told me he had an opening in about a month. I explained that, unfortunately, that didn’t work because it did not give me enough recovery time before I was scheduled to leave for Western Samoa.
He looked at his schedule again, and then asked, “What are you doing tomorrow”.
That is the story I told the doctor today, when I went in for a surgery consult for a hernia on the other side of my abdomen, when he asked about my medical history. He had me drop my shorts, poked and prodded, etc. We then discussed options and decided that surgery was what I should do.
He then smiled at me and asked, “What are you doing tomorrow?”
Fate is funny. I quit my job and my apartment to go into the Peace Corps. I was very excited to be going to Western Samoa. The surgery was successful and I fully recovered. I had all of the training information and was ready to leave for the staging area (San Francisco). Two weeks before my departure Washington called and told me that my particular program had been canceled. Oh great, here I am with no job and no apartment. They told me that they could try to place me in a new program at the next rotation, six months away. Yeah right. So I went looking for work and finally found a job with a start-up called Floating Point Systems, which, it turns out, launched my career.