It's Friday morning, and I'm sitting on the examining table at the doctor's office, waiting. The nurse just took my blood pressure and vital signs and then I laid down on the table wearing nothing but paper, while she attached electrodes to multiple points on my body, and silently read the results on a monitor. At least, I think she was reading results. She could have been watching Netflix for all I know. I didn't ask her what she was seeing. I knew that she'd tell me that I'd have to wait for the doctor.
It's been a very long time since I had a full physical exam. I go to the OB-GYN more or less annually, and I see the dentist every six months, but I avoid the medical profession otherwise. But I have not been well recently and I decided to try something different from my usual health care approach, which is to ignore all symptoms until they go away. I've gotten away with this for a long time, but my luck can't last forever. So here I am.
Fortunately, I was allowed to put my clothes back on after the electrode exam or whatever the hell it was. I'll look it up and see. Meanwhile, I wait in this tiny spotless clinical space that looks and smells like every other doctor's office everywhere. A chair for my stuff, a rolling stool for the doctor, who gets to have all the fun; the paper-covered table for the paper-clothed patient, posters and brochures offering helpful advice and handwashing instructions, cotton balls and tongue depressors in glass jars, a rack that holds a thermometer and a stethoscope and the little pulse oximeter thing that clips onto your index finger, and the monitor that displays the output from all of these devices. All of that in a shiny-floored brightly lit room no bigger than 8 by 10 feet.
*****
I’m a person who knows what she knows. What I don’t know is considerable, and there’s no field of knowledge in which my ignorance is more abysmal than medicine. It turns out that the electrode thing was an EKG. Duh. I’m 55 years old and I’ve never had an EKG in my entire life. And thankfully, my heart is just fine, and everything else is fine, too. Even my high cholesterol isn’t high enough to worry about. I don’t really know why I have been feeling so bad, because apparently, I am in perfect health. A little part of me wanted some kind of bad news, just because I need things to make sense. I need some sort of physical cause for the pain and exhaustion. But overall, I’m very, very relieved that I don’t have a dread disease.
*****
For the rest of the day on Friday, I felt absolutely marvelous. I worked with great focus and purpose, and I accomplished more than I expected to. I had to cut my walk a bit short thanks to a weird early April thunderstorm, so I prepped dinner and did more work and then the sun came out and I resumed my walk and I could have run the whole way. I didn’t run even a step because let’s not get carried away, but after months of malaise and fatigue, I felt like a bottomless pit of energy. Maybe it’s the warm weather and longer days. Or maybe I just needed a medical authority to tell me that there’s not a damn thing wrong with me. Maybe I’ve been wrong about the medical profession all along.
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