At the end of every day, I swear I'm not gonna do it anymore, but the next day, I start and I can’t stop.

I simply spend too much time BS-ing.

Everyone hates to wait, so what can be worse than waiting for the doctor? No, not because of an emergency, but because he’s hearing or telling tall tales in the room next door with someone, tales that have absolutely nothing to do with cardiology.

A 94-year-old woman came to see me recently and told me right off the bat, “Now hurry this up, cuz I gotta make my ride.” After this, she went into a long, funny story of growing up in Brooklyn, moving to Connecticut, raising children and then said, “What the hell, now I’m 94 and close to dying.”

“You’re not dying," I said.

“Oh, don’t gimme that,” she answered in her thick Brooklyn accent. (Her accent, she said, was a “high class Brooklyn accent” because she pronounced vowels and numbers correctly, unlike those with the “low class Brooklyn accent” who said things like thoity (for 30) and Earl (for Oil).)

Then, to explain her dying statement, she said, “I just bought a 36 roll of toilet paper. I use one roll a week, so I figured, I’ll live 36 more weeks.”

I recently saw a guy who had just moved into a senior living center, replete with exercise facilities, but he felt too intimidated to start exercising since he didn’t know people. Where he used to live, he said, he’d have a group of guys who would exercise with him. Now, not knowing anyone, he doesn’t feel like he can go.

So I told him the story of how my wife and I went to Jamaica some years ago, and there was an island about 400 yards away. Boats would shuttle guests back and forth to the pool, beach and bar there. But I wanted to swim in the boat lane, so I just started swimming to the island and back. People saw me and asked to join me because, I thought, that they wanted to swim in a group to be better seen by the boats. Which was the truth for the majority of the 10 or so who formed this swimming club.

But wait, there’s more. You see, it was not just any island with a bar but rather a nudist island with a nudist bar. And so, even though we lost a few swimmers who needed to stop at the island and “to rest,” most of the men and women swimmers swam back without stopping at the island, which proved two key truths: 1. People are always looking to exercise in groups. 2. Most people look better with their clothes on.

Artificial intelligence, they say, will soon replace us doctors, which will probably do away with these needless stories patients and doctors tell each other, stories that just waste time without solving any problems. Computers won't likely miss a drug interaction or fail to dose-adjust someone’s Eliquis for their kidney dysfunction, but can computers and AI really interact with humans and understand all their strange nuances?

I was thinking about this when I asked a patient one day, “Are you in a lot of pain?” And he said, “Oh, doc, have I got pains. I tell ya, I got pains up the old wazoo.” I laughed as I thought to myself that if I were a computer, I would certainly meltdown as I searched every anatomical database in the internet to find out exactly where on the body the “old wazoo” actually is located (or even the “new wazoo” for that matter).

Returning to my classy Brooklyn nonagenarian, we kept chatting more than we were supposed to, joking about how one bout of diarrhea would wipe weeks off her life (no pun intended), and other silly stories. At which point I said, “Hey, you said you were in a rush. You better hurry up and leave or you’ll miss your ride.”

And she said, “Nah, they’ll wait. Besides, I would rather be talking to someone who knows how to B.S.”