An apple a day isn't enough anymore

Growing up, I didn't miss doctor's appointments.

My mother made sure that I had a yearly physical with my pediatrician, that I saw a dentist every six months and anything strange or symptomatic was immediately looked into.

Though I may have complained, I had no doubts about my health.

Come college, I can't say the same. It's not that I don't value my health, but I just cannot get myself to prioritize it when scheduling and following through with visits to the doctor is such a hassle.

Finding a doctor can take hours, let alone finding the office, figuring out answers to questions about your insurance provider and filling out medical history reports. It's not an event I'm looking to pencil in between class, homework, the job search process and work. I just don't have the time.

So after a long drought on the check-up front and a remodeled medical history of sporadic visits for strictly required reasons, I was beginning to get comfortable with the idea that perhaps people don't need to visit doctors nearly as often as they do, if at all.

I began to develop a sense of pride for my immune system's self-reliance, and purposely avoided the doctor when symptoms of any kind showed up, just to test the system's limits.

Every sniffle, cough, rash, mark, cut and pain seemed to go right away - and my break from the medical world became something I saw as a smart move.

One day last semester though, I got so carried away by my sense of pride that I made the fatal mistake of bragging about my superior immune system to my mother.

She didn't share my sense of accomplishment over being able to heal any ailment that came my way. On the contrary, she advised me to start using the brain with which she so thoughtfully endowed me before I was born.

In the elaboration that I subsequently requested, she explained to me that some medical problems are not easily recognizable without professional input, and symptoms for some serious problems can come and go without seeming to get worse.

When I still didn't understand, she told me that I may not have health insurance when I graduate next year and I had better get my butt to the doctor's office before doing so would cost me a year's worth of paychecks. That, I understood.

I took some time out of my busy schedule to look up local doctors' offices and began scheduling appointments. I made appointments with a dermatologist, a podiatrist, a dentist and a general physician all within a two-week span.

In my mind, these were just appointments to "get out of the way." They would take up the amount of time I had scheduled them to take up and my mother could be at rest knowing that the pride I had for my super-healing abilities was completely valid.

I was incorrect. Against all odds, my immune system turned out to have a pretty average fighting ability, if not below average. I was extremely disappointed, because doctor after doctor (after doctor after doctor) handed me laundry lists of things that were wrong, medications to pick up and follow-up visit cards.

Every doctor gave me significantly worse news than I had expected and I was shocked into respecting their previously minimal role in my life. It was one of those less enjoyable epiphanic moments in life where you realize that all around, in more ways than you could have possibly anticipated, you have been completely and mind-blowingly wrong.

It's an uncomfortable experience, but not as uncomfortable as some of the procedures that many of my follow-up appointments would entail.

Lesson learned: health first. If I had just kept myself up to date on my doctors visits, I would not have to have a medical marathon during my last semester at college.

It's easy to avoid the doctor while you physically can, but by the time you physically cannot, you are probably far too late for the doctor to have anything but bad news.

As college students, we try to cram as much as possible into the course of a day and doctors just seem to demand too much time out of those 24 hours -- I understand that line of thought.

My grandmother used to say, though, at the end of the day, all a person has is her health, and it really is the most important thing.

Putting health in any place but first on a general priority list is illogical when you think about it because anything else is impossible without it.

Knowing that my health can be substandard without giving out obvious signals of being so has jolted me into the realization that doctors appointments are something to make time for, even when I don't have it.

Of course, I have yet to inform my mother about my recent change of perspective.

Confirming the incompetency of my immune system -- that it is not true, after all, that "I'm just someone who doesn't get sick" -- has required me to admit to a disconcerting measure of defeat. I wouldn't want to push myself too hard -- I could make myself sick.