I went to hospital last month and met a girl wearing sexy boots and bell-bottomed hipsters with a slit at the hem. Behind her, hanging on the wall, was an expensive black leather jacket. In my estimation, she was hardly 26. But it was clear from the stethoscope around her neck that she was masquerading as a doctor."Sasa!" she hailed me with a toothy smile. I was in shock. 

For years, all the doctors that I have seen have been stern-faced motherly and fatherly figures. If they wore glasses, they were often large and horn-rimmed while their hands and consultation rooms smelt of boiled injections. Now here I was facing a leggy doctor too young to be my date, although I must admit sheepishly that I enjoyed the consultation immensely. I got cured well before I left the consultation room. "I need to check your heartbeat and I can't do that with your coat, shirt and tie on!" she announced, with a cheeky smile. I discovered suddenly that I was shy. While it is okay to peel off my shirt for a motherly doctor, it's seemed rather odd to undress before a "chick" I was certain to bump into that same evening dancing like a witch at a nightspot! My mother had the same problem a decade ago when she pushed a hospital door and found a fresh-faced lad behind a desk. "Kijana, I want to see the provincial ear surgeon," she said in the off-hand manner that the aged address young people. "I am the provincial ear surgeon, Mum," the young doctor responded with a bemused smile. My mother was aghast. "You? But . but you are just my son's age!" Later, though, she grudgingly admitted to me that the "boy" was a genius. "You know that pain that creeps from my eyeball, then crawls into my ear, burns my neck, then wriggles all the way down my back before reappearing mysteriously in my left knee? Imagine that boy has cured it, Ted! "I have been thinking about doctors and old folk because my 70-year-old uncle is unwell. 

At first, he insisted it was only a mere sore throat. But when his tongue got swollen, his sons insisted that he sees a real doctor. Preliminary investigation showed the old man had a brain tumour. But while we froze with shock, he seemed more concerned with being forced by the illness to stay far away from his homestead. "My things are getting spoilt at home while I sit here in Nairobi watching TV like a spoilt vagabond," he muttered again and again. But worse, he had to stay at his son's place - compelling him to share a dining table with his daughter-in-law, something that elders from western Kenya consider unthinkable. More trouble was to come when he went for the operation. "Young woman, I was not born yesterday," he barked at the nurse. "If they want to skin my neck, why must I remove my underwear?" he posed. He became even more incredulous when the doctor announced that he would have to remove his prostate gland, too, accusing that little organ near a man's privates as the real trouble maker. "Kijana, you said that I have a swelling in my head. So why do you want to, err, cut down there?" That aside, old folks hate that business of collecting stool and urine samples, which they find totally beneath their dignity. 

And so is the shame and indignity of enduring jabs on their bare bottoms from nurses young enough to be their daughters. Not that the mumbo jumbo, which doctors speak and write, helps. My grandmother walked out on my father when he took her to the eye surgeon, fuming that she had clearly overheard them conspiring to replace her eyes with that of a dead sheep."I heard them say, 'Yes, yes, Imoni ye likondi.' (Yes, the eyes of a dead sheep will do!) The fools think I am a child. They think I don't know English. Ha!".