By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Today we will ask the burning question: Does a visit to the doctor have to be boring?

Until I sat across from Frank Nalbach in the waiting room, I would have answered, Yes. Nalbach lives in Makiki. He has to take his wife, Catherine, in a taxi to the Kaiser Clinic on Pensacola Street because his legs don't work well enough to respond in an emergency when he's driving.

Frank himself looks like a walking emergency care unit. He brings along his oxygen tank with a hose and a nozzle up his nose. Otherwise he's a dapper 79; shorts, sandals, baseball cap.

I was prowling around the waiting room in search of something to read besides the "Heart Disease Journal" and "Dieting for Idiots." The only other possibility was an article two months old entitled, "Bush & God," in Newsweek. I had always assumed that Bush thinks he is God.

Nalbach looked so interested that I figured he'd made a rare find in the magazine rack. "What are you reading?" I asked.

"Forbes," he said. "I bring my own magazines to the doctor's office because I don't have time to read them at home."

"Terrific idea. How often do you come to see the doctor?"

"Too often. I go through a magazine a week. But then I also bring my wife when she's sick. This one is her appointment."

My boring problem was that I wasn't sick. It always happens because I seldom get sick. When I get sick enough to call for a doctor's appointment, it takes so long to see one that I'm well before I get to the clinic.

Our conversation was interrupted when the nurse called me into the examining room. It's always embarrassing to explain to an attractive nurse that I'm not sick anymore. "I had a bellyache for four days but it's gone."

The doctor was young enough to be my grandson; very bright, thorough, sympathetic. He agreed there wasn't anything wrong but decided to take an EKG so as not to waste my time. The nurse who took my blood pressure is from China. By the time she finished, I went down for a blood test and a urine sample.

I took the sample back out into the lobby and gave it to the cute little lady at the desk. She became very flustered and said I should take it to the lavatory. After searching around, I discovered a cunning little trap door in the wall where urine samples go.

The blood test finished, I had a chance to talk to Frank while his wife was seeing the doctor. He said he retired at age 47 as general manager of the sixth largest oil company in the U.S., came to Hawai'i with his wife and five children and became a taxi driver. That's why he's lived so long.

The doctor and I had a consultation about my health. It must be discouraging not to find anything wrong with a patient. He said I had to come back in a week for the results of the tests. But he won't be here. He's moving to California.