alligator finger

I have this alligator finger. Basically, it's a finger that looks like it might have once belonged to an alligator. It's scaly. Not dry skin scaly, exactly. It's more like black plague pus-laden sore, dead skin, dying nail, little bubbles, raw flesh scaly.

It's possible if I touched a newborn baby with this finger, the baby would explode.

Like any intelligent, well-educated young woman with an abnormal growth (or decay) taking place on a major digit, I took it to the doctor and showed it to her during my regular checkup. "Anything else you'd like to talk to me about?"

That was my cue, see. "Look," I said, and held up my finger. "I have this thing happening."

"Hm," she said, and looked at it. Without touching, mind you. Then she added brightly, "Anything else?"

Which, okay, isn't what I would consider medical care, but at least it had been looked at. I took me and my gross finger back home, where the two of us stewed for a little while.

Fast forward to yesterday, where I'm wandering around the halls of the Brooklyn clinic, waiting for everyone to finish for the day and generally making a nuisance of myself. Dr. H came zipping by, and paused just long enough to talk to me about one of his computers. "----!" he said, and dashed out the door.

I followed him with my finger. "Dr. H! Hey, can I ask you about this thing?"

He grabbed my finger. It oozed at him. Suddenly, it was a Thing.

He hauled two nurses out and ordered them to look for some sort of ointment. "If we don't have samples, you can go to the pharmacy. I'll write you a prescription. Here. It'll be, like, two dollars, you put it on--"

"I'll just put some skin lotion on it," I demured. Too much trouble. Going to the pharmacy would require going outside. Outside was cold. No pharmacy.

Be that way. Abandoning all patients, Dr. H dove after another doctor unfortunate enough to be emerging from an exam room, and sent him off on a hunt for ointment samples. He himself dove into the medicine cabinet, and started rummaging around. "Ask Dr. P if she has any!" he yelled after one of the nurses, who had resurfaced to report failure. She disappeared into an exam room, and reemerged a moment later, trailing Dr. P.

Dr. P inspected my finger. Her verdict: "Gross. --Let me go find some ointment."

In under thirty seconds, I ground the entire clinic to a standstill. And I hadn't even touched a computer yet.

Why can't I get that kind of medical treatment from people I pay for medical treatment, instead of from people who pay me for computer work?