Dumped at the medical altar

MY PRIMARY care doctor dumped me just as our annual romance was about to begin again.

We're not dating. It's just that I think of the summer as the time when strange men get to look at the various orifices of my body as this is the only time when my life slows down enough so this becomes possible.

It is a kind of ritual I expect to happen every year around this time.

I tried not to be angry over how I was abandoned. He wrote me, well me and his other patients, over the Memorial Day weekend, to say he was overwhelmed by the 5,000 patients on his list.

Five thousand patients! I knew he was cheating on me, reading his e-mail to others while I rattled on about what was bothering me at our yearly get together that passed as the physical. But 4,999 others? Talk about "Big Love."

Even more to the point, this is a higher patient to primary physician doctor ratio than in Great Britain.

What made me think I was in a better healthcare system? What made me assume that just because he made the "best in Boston" lists I would get personal care? How would I find someone to replace him?

I thought about avoiding his suggestion that I move to one of the "baby docs," as I think of them, in his practice.

It is not that I want my doctor to die before me, or that I'm into older men or women. I find it just hard to have faith in a doctor who looks younger than my students and even my children.

I tried calling my friends. Could they arrange a doctor for me? I was beginning to feel single again.

Sympathetic, they gave me names and numbers.

Yet just as with all those dates that someone tried to get me years ago with their second cousin once removed, these fix-ups did not work.

"I'm not taking new patients," I was told in every office I called. I was reminded of the truth that it is hardest to find a primary care physician because so much of what they ought to do is not going to be reimbursed.

Then I asked one of the specialists I see what he thought was behind my being cut loose.

"A boutique practice, I would guess," he told me.

So maybe my doctor was abandoning me not just because he's exhausted. He wants to have fewer patients for more money and to get paid for what doctors used to do: know who you are, make referrals, and triage your needs through the system.

And why, I thought, was he not picking me? Had I lost out in the medical equivalent of "American Idol"? Was I too sick? Too demanding?

Then I wondered: here I am, an aging professional, a historian of medicine and women's health, no less. I write and teach about this. I have argued with my employer about the state of our health insurance and tried to organize around how much we were being charged.

As with many middle-class professionals, I thought having the "good" insurance would make a difference.

I should have realized what I teach: only a political change in the health system is going to fix any of this. I cannot do it alone.

So while I'm searching for a new doctor (does anyone want me?), I'll read over the healthcare plans of the candidates for president. Maybe there is a political, if not a personal, solution out there.

I just hope I do not get really sick before I find one.

Susan M. Reverby is the Marion Butler McLean professor in the history of ideas and professor of women's studies at Wellesley College.