What TV Westerns didn’t teach me

If you’re gonna have your prostate checked, you want a stranger to do it…

A while back, I went to my doctor for a check-up (don’t worry, I wore a mask and he was dressed like he was about to make an Apollo moon-landing) and naturally, that made me think of TV Westerns.

Allow me to explain, assuming that’s possible.

I grew up watching TV Westerns like Have Gun—Will Travel, Maverick (the ones with Jim Garner, not the other guy), The Rifleman, Wanted: Dead or Alive (hang on, this might take a while), Sugarfoot, Cheyenne, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Annie Oakley, Bonanza, Branded, Broken Arrow, Cimarron Strip, Death Valley Days, Fury, The Guns of Will Sonnett, Alias Smith and Jones, The High Chaparral, Hopalong Cassidy, Laramie, Laredo, The Lone Ranger, Rawhide, The Roy Rogers Show, Sky King (a Western with Cessna airplanes) The Virginian, Yancy Deringer, The Cisco Kid and  Tales of Wells Fargo in which Dale Robertson traveled the West opening fraudulent checking accounts.

(OK, I admit I totally made up that bit about Dale Robertson, so if you’re one of his heirs, please don’t sue me.)

Take a look at that list of TV shows and it’s surprising I got anything done besides watching Westerns and I gotta say they must have made more of an impression on me than anything I learned in school because I remember very little of that, but still remember the theme from Rawhide:

Keep rollin', rollin', rollin'
Though the streams are swollen
Keep them dogies rollin', rawhide
Through rain and wind and weather
Hell bent for leather
Wishin' my gal was by my side
All the things I'm missin'
Good vittles, love and kissin'
Are waiting at the end of my ride

Move 'em on, head 'em up
Head 'em up, move 'em on
Move 'em on, head 'em up, rawhide

(Assuming you’re the right age: that tune’s running through your head now, isn’t it?)

Anyway…

These shows provided a completely realistic look at the Old West assuming cowboys visited their dentists regularly, didn’t have BO that would knock over a goat and had a favorite horse that would show up when they whistled and allow them to escape the bad guys by dropping off a convenient balcony onto their horse’s back without breaking the horse’s spine or rupturing an equine kidney.

In real life I’m thinking a horse smart enough to come when Hopalong whistled would fall for that stunt once and then next time take a step back so Hopalong would miss the saddle and crush a testicle on the saddle horn.

Also…

A couple of the shows seemed to exist in some weird time warp where the bad guys drove Plymouth coupes while Roy Rogers rode a horse, but always knew a shortcut that would allow him and Trigger to beat the bad guys to the pass.

OK, so maybe watching all those Westerns gave me an unrealistic idea of how stuff works in the real world and now that I think of it, my view of the medical profession was warped by Gunsmoke.

In that show, after Matt Dillon once again got shot in the shoulder or some other non-life-threatening locale, Doc Adams would tell him to come by the office and he’d sew him up or rub some liniment on it which should have worried the shit out of Matt because Doc seemed to spend a lot of time getting hammered in the Long Branch Saloon while hanging out with Miss Kitty; a “dance hall girl” which is the job description they used because the 1950s TV audience was not ready for “Old West Ho.”

So having Matt Dillon and Doc Adams as role models, when my best friend graduated from med school I thought we’d have the same relationship.

Didn’t work out that way.

I decided to go see him for a physical which got off to a lousy start when he came into the examining room with a big grin and a speculum – a medical tool for spreading body orifices – and told me to bend over.

Funny…but no chance.

The exam went downhill from there because I refused to answer personal questions and didn’t want him holding one of my testicles and asking me to turn my head to the left and cough.

Pretty sure he didn’t want to do that either.

So it turns out if someone is going to stick a finger up my backside to check my prostate – and I assume that’s what they’re doing and not conducting some medical school practical joke – I want it to be a stranger, which may or may not say something weird about me.

Your call.

But after some dude holds one of my private body parts or shines a flashlight into an orifice, I don’t want to hang out with him and have dinner. Those private moments should be reserved for people I will seldom see again.

Now back to the highly-misleading Gunsmoke.

If there was an episode based on Doc checking Matt’s prostate, I missed it and thank god for that, although I gotta admit that might have qualified as Must-See TV just to see the look on Matt’s face.

So what have we learned today?

1. There are certain experiences you don’t want to share with anyone but a stranger.

2. You shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV.

And Rawhide had a great theme song.