Dr. Javier Dorfmann has perennially unfulfilled fantasies about competing in the Tour de France. Just starting his second year of internal medicine residency at St. God’s Hospital, he has put aside his usual flea collar and replaced it with the mark of his true passion, the cyclist outfit.
Dr. Dorfmann is sponsored by no commercial enterprise, but his new scrubs come pre-desecrated with an ungodly number of logos and patches and illegible foreign words. His spandex scrub pants do for men’s genitalia what yoga pants do for women’s behinds. All the world’s a stage, don’t you know, and Javier is proud of his bulge.
“I want to become the resident cyclist not just of St. God’s, but of the entire internal medicine community,” says Dorfman as he adjusts his douchie skull cap and lines up the memory-foam buttpad on his right cheek to augment his already protuberant ischial tuberosity. “I want to look the part, from top to bottom.”
And look the part he does. When not on his bicycle, Dorfman stands ramrod straight as if he had been riding all night without a seat, with just a long pole jammed up his bum. His hair is coiffed, and he wears his wraparound sunglasses even in the radiology reading room. He strolls down the middle of the corridors and weaves back and forth whenever someone tries to pass, causing a long line to build up behind him. When the cafeteria line stops, however, he doesn’t wait, but just plows on through.
And Dorfman doesn’t just stop with looking the part. His emotions are coordinated with his cycle. How could they not be? After all, his bicycle is made of carbon nanofiber with synthetic organic latex microthin tires, and weighs a total of only 9.4 ounces. “Buying a bike that was just one ounce heavier would have saved me $1200, but it would have cost an extra 21 cent stamp for shipping. Anyhow, I needed to conserve weight for all my patches from my non-sponsors.” Dorfman follows this statement by taking a bite out of a $6 power bar and squirting Gatorade from a sports bottle into his mouth and over his face, neck and hair.
He carries his passions into the clinic. In the exam room, Dorfman sports a tiny rear view mirror to the left of his eyebrow. While performing data entry into his EMR, he can watch to see if his patient is having a stroke behind his back.
Like everyone else, he pedals feverishly in the hamster wheel of the modern medical system. But Dr. Javier Dorfman does it with cyclist style, implementing the very best of the cyclist culture. And that makes all the difference.
John Hunt, MD is a pediatric pulmonologist, allergist, immunologist, and author of a satirical medical novel, “Assume the Physician,” which must be read by every person on the planet (today preferably). Profits from sales of the book support his non-profit Trusted Angels Foundation, helping orphanages, schools and entrepreneurs in Liberia, West Africa.
