Fun at the Doctor's
I didn't recognize my own name when summoned by the tech in the doctor's waiting room. "Caroline?” said for the second time but no one has called me that since the day I was baptized. “Oh! that’s me!” I cried, shooting up out of the chair. A few cents short of a dollar I could all but hear her thinking and sure enough she began repeating all her instructions, to "put my bag HERE and my coat THERE and to step on the scales please with my boots on, yes with your boots on , it doesn’t matter," and a sentence ending 'Not for the likes of you' hung in the air. "141? But I don’t weigh 141" I said but she was on to the next step: "How tall do you think you are?" she demanded as if to calculate how far off I'd be this time. I thought about saying six foot nine. Instead I said, "I think I'm five five and a half," and I was, exactly.Things took a happier turn from then on. In less than ten minutes’ time this same tech took my temperature and my blood pressure and administered an EKG. “Wait you’re a phlebotomist too?” I said when she pulled out a hypodermic and began siphoning out a couple of shot glasses' worth of blood from my arm. “No but they train us to do all this stuff now.“It’s efficient” she added. “It saves money,” said I. We both smiled then. We didn’t run the place. We just underlings, just a couple of jamokes, well down on the old ladder.Once she left, an RN came in to take a history things got even more cheerful. This nice woman praised me to the skies. She liked my vitals. She congratulated me for not being on any medication, for having no illnesses and no disorders. I got to feeling like I'd won felt like I’d won the lottery. "I haven’t had a cold in five years!" I started to brag before remembering how annoyed I get with Old Dave when he tries for a similar boast as we're dressing in the morning say."Well you’re still gonna die one day, ” I tell him every time. “Hey maybe not!” he smiles, stepping into his underpants.“So do you want a flu shot?” the nurse was now asking me.“Eh” I said in my role as Supergirl.“Get one” she said.“Seriously” she said, which caused me to repeat my remark about never getting sick.“I bet I know why," she said. "I bet you wash your hands all the time."“I do actually. My time spent as a massage therapist taught me about that. Also my cousin Bernice who says more disease enters through the nares than anywhere else" the nares being the front part of your nose, those twin portals leading into your nasal passages."You wouldn't believe it. The bathroom here is right across from my office. You wouldn’t believe how many people flush and come right out. They don’t wash!""They don’t wash!" I echoed. Then the two of us also shared a smile, superior human beings that we were.SO all in all t was a very satisfying visit in spite of the two Band-Aids I'm walking around with one from the flu shot and one from the shot glass worth of blood pulled from me as if by leeches. All for health I say and remember the nares, to keep them safe from germs! These are my nares below here. Time to get out the tweezers again it seems! :-)
