A Doctor meets a lawyer.

We are getting on in life and the urge to wrap up the worldly affairs gets stronger by the day. Of all such affairs the will is probably the most important. By will I mean the legal document that is pulled out of the safe and opened with great ceremony after the body has been appropriately disposed. The family lawyer and trustee read the document with due solemnity to all family members who may be entitled to share what is left of your estate after paying hospital, nursing home, funeral home, trustee and the lawyer. It took some convincing for me to believe that financial managers will leave more in the estate than all the hawks will demand for their real and imaginary services. The clinching argument was that the likelihood of such a happy happenstance was greater if things were clearly spelt out and the work of the trustee and the lawyer was reduced to a minimum.

I wrote a clear set of instructions on what was to be done with any estate left after paying for care in my old age. The instructions were emailed to the lawyer of my husband’s company. After exchange of several phone calls and emails, the gentleman drew up a legal document and advised me to meet him at his office at 5 PM on Friday. I drove to his downtown office at the height of rush hour and found a parking place which was not in a tow-away zone. I had to run to his office and curse the elevator in three languages for keeping me waiting to get to his office at 4:59. The front door to the office was open. It seemed that the secretary had already left. I surreptitiously looked in the hardworking man’s office but there was no sign of his august presence. I sat down in the waiting area and opened a two year old Time Magazine to remind me of the world shattering events in one of the final weeks of the last millennium. I was engrossed in the story of President Clinton’s cigar when an elderly man hobbled in. “Oh Dr. Jolly, so sorry to keep you waiting. I was hit by a car when hurrying from a meeting to get back. Will you mind looking at my knees and my back where the pain is most excruciating.” He started stripping his clothes off and I had no choice but to examine him and recommend that he take some pain killer and see his doctor as soon as possible. “You won’t happen to have some with you by any chance, the pain is killing me,” he whimpered. I searched my handbag and found a few tablets to tide him over. He told me where the washroom was so I could get him some water to wash down the tablets. After the tablets were duly swallowed, he put his clothes back on and asked me to stop in his office to sign the papers.

He produced two copies of a standard form with a poorly typed document for me to glance over and sign. Then he signed it as a witness and gave me a copy. After that he produced an envelope with great ceremony and remarked, “This is my invoice for the fee for services. I hope you will find every thing satisfactory.” I stuffed the envelope in the handbag, thanked him and walked to the car. After all the events of last hour, a parking ticket would have been the last straw. Thankfully, some one up above was looking after the camel.

When I got home I looked at his bill. Looking at the sloppy typing and the number staring me in the face, I felt the decimal had moved a couple of spaces to the right. When my husband got home, I showed it to him. He was only mildly surprised with the amount, having been fleeced by lawyers at regular interval in his business dealings. However, when I told him the story of lawyer’s accident, he was quite disturbed. He went straight to the phone and left the lawyer a message to call my office and leave his health insurance details so I could bill Alberta Health Care for my services. Unfortunately, my service rates are fixed by the government and my fee did not amount to a tiniest fraction of what I had to pay him. To rub salt in the wounds (mine, not his), my fee was pre-tax and he had to be paid out of post-tax income.

Why oh why did I not take my father’s advice and go to the Law school for a couple years instead of ten years of hard slog called medical training?