Ice Cream Truck

 

To show their appreciation for all our hard work, the museum hires an ice cream truck to serves us free ice cream. Everyone who walks past my desk asks if I’m having any, and I tell every one of them that I shouldn’t eat ice cream. It shouldn’t bother me –there are just not many things considered “treats” that are diabetic-friendly- but it does. 

My appointment is an hour earlier than usual, and on a Thursday rather than a Wednesday. It’s nice not to have to use the scooter on the bus. 

As I’m waiting to check in, three security officers suddenly start running like mad down the hall as one of them yells, “Clear a path! Clear a path!” I realize the woman at the desk has been trying to get my attention and I apologize for being distracted.

I head upstairs and have only sat for a few moments when the door opens and a woman I’ve never seen before calls my name. She’s older, with fried red hair and huge bangs. Her name is Bridget and she leads me to room three, which I’ve rarely been in. It’s tucked back in the corner and cramped. A sticker of a smiling octopus with the word SUCKER is slapped on the glove dispenser. “Code gray room 221, Code gray room 221,” a voice on the intercom says. 

Bridget is friendly and chatty. She’s only been here a few months but she’s worked in wound care for ten years. “I worked with KC at Vital,” she says. Vital is apparently a clinic that specializes in helping people get off respirators. “Everyone’s in pretty rough shape there,” she says. 

She draws a line along the cast then saws it in two, only it doesn’t come apart, so she goes back over the line again and again and eventually goes to get Shelley. Shelley immediately sees where the cast is so thick it needs extra cutting. It still takes a long time to cut it off. Bridget apologizes and says they didn’t do casting at Vital. 

She changes my bandages and says that the doctor only does debriding once a week. She gets the casting and water bucket ready and I can tell that she’s preparing for the finicky Dr. Thompson. 

True to form, when the doctor comes in she immediately adjusts my chair and complains about how tiny the room is. As she wraps the cast material I ask where she’s traveled to lately and she says Thailand. I try to get her to talk about it but she just asks, “Is that ninety degrees?” meaning my foot. I tell her it’s as close as I can get. 

She doesn’t splash as much as usual, and when Bridget drops a fifth roll into the water, she looks at it and says, “You know, I think this is big enough.” My foot does, indeed, look huge. Bridget apologizes for wasting the roll but the doctor tells her not to worry about it, then fishes it out and throws it into the trash bin. 

 Once the cast is dry I put on my shoe and hobble over to the reception desk to ask when my next appointment is. “8:00 Monday,” says Bree. I tell her that was this week, and she looks annoyed. “It’s every Monday and Thursday.” I tell her I thought this was only once a week, and really can only get out of work in the late afternoon. 

“It’s twice a week until your wound goes down,” says Shelley. “They should have told you that.”

“I’m going to have trouble making that,” I say, feeling a wave of anxiety rising up. It was hard enough to convince them to let me have this Monday morning off, now I have to go through this every week, for how many weeks? 

“If you can’t making it we’ll have to skip the cast,” says Agnes, passing by. 

I feel sick to my stomach when I leave. I’ve been trying so hard to balance things in a way that will make my life bearable, but I see now that I am failing. Whatever hope I had of being able to live even a moderately normal life has been shattered. I’m exhausted from trying to take care of myself. What’s the point when the only reward is extending the finish line a few extra hobbled steps? My life is miserable. I should have just said to hell with it and gotten in line with all my healthy, non-diabetic coworkers and ordered a big cone of lavender salted caramel. 

Grateful Patient Day

 Monday morning I take my crutches instead of the scooter to my appointment, which despite my efforts at padding it is still tearing up my knee. I can’t bring myself to deal with the wheelchair on the bus. 

     It feels strange to be here this early, and on a Monday. Check in is smooth and by the time I make my way upstairs I’m still fifteen minutes early. 

     At 8 Shelley comes out and says the doctor is in a meeting and won’t see me until 8:30. I tell her it’s fine; I should still get out in plenty of time to put in a half day at work. 

     As I wait, I get an email from the chief philanthropy officer for the hospital.

You just missed Grateful Patient Day, but it is never too late to honor our exceptional caregivers and the exceptional care they provide. 

We wanted to re-send yesterday’s email to make sure you know that you can still show your gratitude for excellent care and invest in the health of our community by making a tax-deductible gift today.

With gratitude,

Are these the same exceptional caregivers who had to go on strike because the hospital refused to pay them a decent wage? I guess I should be grateful it’s not another one of the past due notices they keep sending me. I wonder how Luigi is doing. 

A pretty but severe looking woman with green-tipped hair wheels an old man out of the elevator. She deposits him then sits down behind him so that they’re not facing each other. They don’t say a word as she types on her phone. Finally she asks, “When did you retire, dad? I’m filling out the long forms for tomorrow’s appointment.” He tells her and she goes back to typing sternly.

They get called in and then it’s my turn. Vicki leads me to the first room, where KC is waiting excitedly with the saw. “I haven’t done one of these in a while, I hope I remember how!” She cackles. I roll up my pant leg. “Where’s your cast?” She asks. 

“I’m getting my first one today.”  She looks crestfallen, and wheels the saw away.

She returns to take my vitals and measurements, which Vicki enters in the computer. She says that Sally in hyperbaric says hi. I ask KC what she did this weekend and she says she took out her yard debris bags. I tell her I didn’t know she had a yard and she says she doesn’t.

Her and Vicki watch a video of a doctor putting on a total compact cast. “This guy’s the cast guru,” KC says, clearly in awe. 

“He’s so fast,” Vicki whispers.

Hesitant to break the mood, I ask, “Are there wound care conventions?” 

“There’s a yearly one in Vegas, and another one that moves around,” says KC. “Oh and a local one at Skamania Lodge. I’ve never gone, it’s really expensive.”

“It’s free for me,” says Vicki. “I go every year. Well, not last year. And not when COVID was bad. But other than that.”

“Wound care nerds,” I say. They both smile proudly, then leave. I don’t feel as miserable as last time but I still feel haunted and hollow. I hear the sound of the saw start up in the next room over. Be gentle with yourself, the curtain reads. Nurture strength of spirit. Your balance is now ready to be viewed. Thank you for your donation. 

After a while the curtain is pushed open by Dr Baylor, the blandly perky substitute doctor, followed by Vicki and Shelley. I’m relieved to have a break from Taggert. She asks how much drainage there was and they say medium to large. 

“Maybe we should wait until next week to do this.” Baylor says. “I don’t want to risk the infection getting worse. If there is an infection. The x-rays showed no osteomyelitis at least.”

“He’s coming back Thursday.” Says Shelley. “He should be fine until then.” Vicki agrees, but the doctor seems apprehensive. Finally she gives in and leaves Vicki to prepare the cast. 

I haven’t had one since… when? January? It all comes back to me as she lays out the supplies. First she pulls on the stocking, then lays a flat sheet of padding along the front of my leg and two a disk of cotton on either side of my ankle. She wraps my leg in sheets of batting, which she tears from the roll with a soft, pleasing rip. Then my favorite part: the box. 

The box is actually just a thick sheet of gray foam filled with holes, sticky on one wide and covered with ribs of  foil on the other. She folds it across the front of my foot to make what looks more like a silvery taco than a box. She cuts off the excess on either side with an L-shaped scissors. I find this whole part of the process oddly satisfying. Perhaps I’m becoming a bit of a wound care nerd myself.

While she’s doing all this, I ask if the guys still work here. She says no, that “It’s just us women now, aside from Tim. Do you know Tim? He’s our fill in.” She says that Aaron left to do what she calls “more hospital type work.” She doesn’t mention Sjon and I don’t ask. 

We talk about the weather, which leads to her talking about her son’s recent wedding in Virginia, where it was so humid everyone was drenched with sweat for the pictures. This somehow leads to her saying she’s going to see Neil Young with her husband in sun river. I try to get her to talk some more about Neil Young but she isn’t interested. I hear the saw going again. 

Baylor returns in gloves and a gown, and Vicki unwraps the first foil packet of casting and drops it into a bucket of water that reads Essity on the side along with a list of products. Everything is advertising. 

The doctor unrolls the yellow Fiberglas around my foot, my ankle, my shin, following it by two more rolls. When it’s done she isn’t happy with how little coverage there is over the box, so she tears open a fourth roll. I hate when there’s a fourth roll, it makes the cast even bulkier. Sure enough, when she’s finished I can barely squeeze my pant leg over it. Vicki gives me a new shoe and I take my first step. I had forgotten just how fucking heavy these casts are. 

As I leave, I clomp past KC, who is standing right in my way on her phone. I ask if they’re not keeping her busy enough.

“Not today, it’s a little boring,” she admits. “I’m indulging in some Amazon therapy.” I tell her to get me something nice. 

My bus comes right away, I make my connection with no problems, and am at work by 10:30. I lean my crutches against the wall and collapse in my chair, suddenly exhausted by this first step of what is going to be many months of this same routine, every week making the dull, plodding journey across town. It all went pretty smoothly, but, ungrateful patient that I am, I’m sick of it already

To Basin and Fathom

    As I’m waiting at the bus shelter, or near it, rather, since its benches are being taken up by a gray-skinned man and his bags of cans, I see a bus line I’ve never noticed before. 40 SWANN ISLAND, its scrolling sign reads, TO BASIN & FATHOM.

     My bus, the less poetic 19 GLISAN, arrives shortly. After a few stops a short, squat woman haltingly steers her wheelchair on. She clutches a phone in her claw and haltingly pokes at the screen with one hooked finger. She says something but I can’t understand it. She says it again, more insistently, and her phone drops to the floor. I pick it up and try to hand it to her, but she can’t seem to grasp it. I’m surprised it’s not in a holder or on a lanyard or something. What would have happened if there had been no one around to pick it up for her? What is she doing out here on her own, anyways? I certainly understand wanting to be independent, but she seems barely able to function.

    I finally manage to tuck her phone behind her wrist. She doesn’t make any more sounds for the rest of the trip.

     When we cross the river, I see the 40 bus again, halfway on its journey to the docks and shipyards. Somehow we’ve caught up with it.

    I’m nervous that I’ll have to face the receptionist I was impatient with last week, but there’s only one woman working the counter and it’s someone I’ve never seen before. There’s only one patient ahead of me in line but I wait fifteen minutes before it’s my turn. The moment I roll away a second receptionist appears and calls, “Next!”

     Karen, with the wan, masklike face, calls me in. She measures the wound and says it’s both wider and deeper, which surprises me, because I hadn’t been on it as much. I show her the sore on my knee from the scooter as well, which has gone from being an angry red splotch to a furious wound.  

     Agnes steps in and says, “Oh that doesn’t look good. What the hell, Seann.” I don’t say anything. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t just barge in and give you dirty looks,” she says. I tell her if she didn’t I’d be worried, but I can tell my tone doesn’t sound as playful as I intend, and she doesn’t laugh. The pit is opening up again, that old familiar void, and i don’t have the strength to fight it so I let myself sink into it, pulling it shut behind me. The room is a blur. I hear KC’s voice from the next room but I don’t feel any sort of thrill. I can barely move. I feel like a bug immobilized by a shrew’s venom. 

Karen places numbing cream on my already-numb foot. I can’t bear to look directly at it.  I never do, really, even when I’m washing or inspecting it or bandaging it. I peep, I squint, I steal glances, but I can’t bear to actually gaze at the damn thing. Red, ugly, and misshapen, it is a symbol of everything I hate about myself, a product of my own neglect, avoidance, and weakness. 

When she leaves, the foot starts to grow until it fills the room, a fleshy blob consuming everything in its path, and since I can no longer avoid seeing it I squeeze my eyes tight as I feel it start to dissolve me. 

“Stop,” I whimper, not sure how the doctor is going to react to this latest development. 

Just then the curtain is thrown back and KC appears. She tactfully doesn’t mention anything about my gigantic foot, which is now taking up most of the room. I ask her what she’s been up to and she starts chattering on about a show called The Gilded Age, which she has just binge-watched. She pulls down her mask when she talks. She has a nice mouth, with straight teeth, and her hair looks especially red, but I don’t have any interest in small talk, and feel incapable of flirting, so I just listen. 

And then she flits away and Taggert is there. No dancing this time, she plunges right in. She does not like what she sees. What’s that redness? What’s that swelling? And the wound on the knee. “You know what this means,” she says. I do know what it means. “You can’t walk and you can’t use the scooter. You still have that wheelchair, right?”

    I’m not fully here, though. I suddenly realize that the pit of depression and the wound in my foot are both the same hole. That I am being sucked into myself, drowning in a sea of reeking discharge. My ears are clogged with it but I’m listening just enough to be able to respond to the doctor in a way that makes it seem like I am not, in fact, suffocating. 

    I’m so intent on doing this that it barely registers when Jenny comes in, followed by Sandy. I haven’t seen either of them since the strike, and while I feel a tiny pulse of warmth, I am too disconnected to be able to really talk coherently. I’m overwhelmed by all the forces swirling around me, Karen’s blank stare, Taggert’s babbling (“Everyone hates me because I always bring the bad news!” she barks), KC’s smile, the word LARGER scribbled next to my wound measurements on the whiteboard, and most of all that gigantic foot which still looms before me, emitting a harsh whistling shriek like a creature in a horror movie. 

    After begging me to come back to the hyperbaric chamber for another round of treatment, Jenny and Sandy leave and Taggert gets back on her wheelchair kick. 

    “I know it’s difficult to hear,” she says. “Your entire life will change. You might have to find an apartment that’s handicap accessible. I told you about my brother with MS right? We had to redo our entire house so he could get around. And then when we moved the house got snatched up right away by another family who needed something accessible. But you just can’t think of this foot as being for walking. I tell my patients I don’t even want them walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Get a bedpan, get a urinal. Everything will be different from now on.”

    I guess I should appreciate that she is willing to talk straight with me, that she doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Other doctors offer tepid reassurances and canned inspirational pablum. In general, I prefer Taggert’s bluntness, but right now it’s just pounding me deeper into the ground.

    Of course sometimes I do wonder if she isn’t overreacting, if the situation might be less dire than she makes it out to be. But I’ve been coming here for two years now, and she has almost always been proven right.  

    And then, even though I don’t mean to, I find myself whining to her about  how lonely I feel, how I despair of ever finding a partner, of how my isolation is literally killing me. It all spills out, and I hate myself for being so pathetic. Poor lonely Seann will never be in love, will never experience intimacy again. An entire population of children is being purposely starved to death and I’m sad because I can’t get laid.

    “Maybe you need to expand your circles,” Taggert says. “Start trying to meet people with, you know, these kinds of issues.”

    “I should try dating other cripples like me, you mean?” She shoots me a look and I instantly feel awful. 

    She finishes debriding my foot and takes a step back and says, “I don’t like how red this looks. Where did you measure the depth?” Karen tells her and Taggert asks, “Was there bone?” Karen says she didn’t think so but she opens a fresh cotton swab and pokes it into the oozing hole. 

    “I can’t tell,” she says. Taggert takes the swab from her and does some more poking.

“    Okay,” she says. I can see her thinking. “Okay. Let’s get you on an antibiotic just to be safe. You don’t have any allergies, right? And I want you to get an x-ray, if you’re okay with that. They’re open until six. Your insurance approved you for a cast but we can’t do one if the bone’s infected.” She leaves to call in the referral. “It’s down in the basement,” she says.

    “Oh I know,” I say.  

    Ten minutes later I wheel past the reception booth for the x-ray department. There is a woman in the booth but there is also a sign that says to check in is at the next room over. The woman doesn’t look up so I obey the sign and go to the next room over and it suddenly comes back to me; this is the room I came to a year and a half ago, or was it longer? The most oppressive waiting room I’d ever been in, with very confusing signage as to how one signs in. There hadn’t been anyone here then and there isn’t anyone here now, although it is nowhere near six o’clock. The reception window is now covered with a metal drop-down gate.

    I wheel back out to the booth. The young woman has her hair in a big bun on top of her head, and a lot of what I think at first are birthmarks but turn out to be piercings. I give her my name and she looks me up and tells me to go back into the deserted room and use the phone there to tell them I’m here. I go back and sure enough there is a black phone mounted to the wall. I can’t remember the last time I saw or used a phone like this. It wasn’t here during my last visit, which means that within the last year they went to the trouble of installing what looks to be a thirty-year-old landline here.

    A poorly-worded sign next to it gives a number to call, and I press the light-up buttons and a woman picks up, sounding irritated. I tell her I’m there for an x-ray and she says I need to go to the plaza. I tell her the receptionist told me to call this number and she angrily says, “like I said. You need to go to the plaza. Tell her I told you that.” I hang up and go back to the woman with the bun. 

    “She said I need to go to the plaza,” I say. The plaza is the medical complex across the street. I’ve spent many, many hours and seen many doctors within its depressing corridors.

    “No, this is the right place. Go call her back and tell her I said so,” she young woman says. 

    “You call her. I’m not talking to that bitch again,” I snarl. She looks taken aback. “I’ll go to the fucking Plaza,” I say, and wheel away before I say anything else I’ll regret. This is now two idiot receptionists I’ve snapped at within a week. 

     I head outside and across the street to the Plaza and down the hall into the imaging center. By some act of great mercy, the woman at the counter is nice, the tech comes to fetch me immediately, and the x-rays themselves only take a few minutes. It’s too little too late though. I feel broken. The only thoughts that seem to be able to survive in the toxic soup swirling in my head are I’m so tired, I can’t do this anymore, I want to die. Weak, pathetic thoughts from a hateful narcissist drowning in self pity, who, despite what well-intentioned friends keep insisting, does, in fact, deserve everything that is coming to him.  

    The next morning I get a call from Agnes as I’m scooting along to work. Instead of dragging out the wheelchair I’ve just put extra padding on the scooter. What does any of it matter, anyways.

    “Sorry I know you probably don’t want to hear from me first thing in the morning,” she says. “But doc says your x-rays look normal so Briana is going to callyou later on to schedule your cast.”

“    Okay, thanks, that’s great,” I say. And it is; I had spent most of the night worrying about what another bone infection would mean. Another two months in the chamber, another round of sick leave, another battlewith the disability people. At this point it seems like it might be better to just chop it off.  

    As I roll up to the museum, I pass a guy I see at the bus stop nearly every day, hunched in his wheelchair, black raincoat draped across his shoulders. I say hello but he’s profoundly stoned, a leaf of scorched foil in his hand. I wonder how he thought his life would urn out, what he hoped for, what he dreamed of becoming. The foil slips from his fingers and flutters to the sidewalk and I swerve so I don’t crush it beneath my wheels, dragging my enormously swollen monster foot, now the size of an elephant, behind me. It will keep growing and growing until it is the size of a whale, and the gaping wound will open wide like a mouth and suck me in as once and for all I swallow myself whole. 

Samsara

     On Wednesday I leave work for my appointment as usual. The bus is full, though there are no colorful ex co-workers or anyone else of note. I roll up to the desk but before I reach the cute older woman’s spot, the woman next to her calls me over. I used to get her all the time; she is the only one here who still reads off a bewilderingly long list of COVID-related questions, and she always reads them carefully from the screen, looking a little confused, as if it’s her first time. I miss the big Black woman who worked here for a time. “I gotchoo, McCollum!”   

    I give her my birth date and name and she asks me to spell it and I spell it and she asks for my birth date and I give that to her and she asks me to spell my name again. I speak slowly and enunciate each letter clearly, as if I’m talking to a slow child.

    “What are you here for?” she asks. I say wound care.  “You’re not scheduled for anything,” she says. I tell her I come here every Wednesday at this time. She shakes her head. I ask if she can call upstairs and she says no. 

    “So I need to call myself? Even though I’m standing right here, and you have the number right there?” She says that’s right. 

    For years I tried to develop a daily meditation practice, but I always lacked the discipline. Earlier this summer, a coworker forwarded me a free trial of a wakefulness app. I always hate these things, but for some reason I instantly loved this one. For the first time, I am able to focus enough to sit and try to hone my awareness every day. I feel it affecting my moods throughout the day. I’ve noticed myself feeling more patient and slower to anger, and when I do get frustrated, I don’t cling to it the way I used to. I think it’s really helping me.

     “Thanks for all your fucking help,” I snarl, and wheel over to the side of the lobby to look up my chart. I can’t remember my password, so I give up and look up the wound care number.

    “Wound care,” says the receptionist. I’ve only called a few times and she always answers like this; no hello, no name, no “may I help you.” I take a deep breath and tell her who I am and that I’m here for my appointment. 

“    They’re in a meeting today, they canceled all their afternoon appointments. Didn’t anyone tell you?”

    I race to catch my bus and see it pull away just as I’m cresting the hill. I’m caked in sweat and I smell disgusting. Every day they say this heat wave is going to break and every day they’re wrong. It’s bad enough that I’ve wasted two hours of my precious sick time, bad enough that I’ve run across town in the blazing heat for nothing, but after all this I didn’t even get an interesting story out of it. Maybe some crazy person will shoot me on the bus, but more likely they’ll just shit their pants.

    I sit in the paltry shade of the bus shelter and try to pay attention to my ragged breath and racing thoughts and roiling emotions, try to do like the guide on the awareness app instructs and look try to see the one who is paying attention, and even though the point of the exercise is that when you look, you find that no one is really there, I find that there actually is, and he’s a vicious little bastard, screaming his grievances at the world. And I fear that no amount of mindfulness will ever shut him up.

Pumpkin Spice Gummy Worms

    The air is thick and hot when I leave for my wound care appointment. The bus ride is uneventful until we get to Burnside, when a familiar face gets on the bus and plops down next to me, yelling at someone on the phone.

    “I’m going to the B-side. The B-SIDE. Si. Si. I’ll meet you there. Love you. Mwah.” He turns to me. “Hello, Papi.” He smells like beer. It’s three in the afternoon. I ask how he’s doing and he shakes his head sadly. I ask him what’s wrong. 

    “All I did was talk to her in Spanish and she reported me to HR,” he says, with no preamble. “They had already made me sign a paper forcing me to deny my Latino heritage.”

     “That doesn’t sound legal,” I say. I heard a somewhat different version of this story a year ago when I bumped into him on the street. He worked in the AV department at the museum before being fired for flirting with too many coworkers. I run into him from time to time and he always either smacks my ass or kisses me, sometimes both.

    “They said I was not allowed to touch people,” he says, stroking my arm. “But I am Latino, it is what we do, we touch people. So then this crazy woman reports me just for speaking to her.” 

    “Are you working?” I ask.

    He stares me in the face and shakes his head, looking like he is going to cry. 

    “I’m slinging tamales and doing some catering.”

    “Are you making rent?”

    “No, it’s terrible. My friend, this is my stop. I am meeting my amigo at the B-side. It is so good to see you. Give my best to everyone who doesn’t hate me.” He kisses me on the cheek and dashes off. 

I check in with the cute older woman at the hospital counter, making small talk about COVID. She says she’s never had it, which is remarkable considering where she works. I grab a lavender colored mask from the desk and say hi to the sleepy guy driving the people mover and head upstairs.

Shelley comes out to collect me before I have a chance to sit down. The office is empty aside from her, Gladys, and Karen. 

“You’re the only one here!” cries Shelley. “Three women lavishing attention on you! Don’t you love it? Mind you, it’s probably not the kind of attention you’d like.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” I say. 

“I just heard that they did a study and found that when a bunch of women get together and talk without any men around on a regular basis it lowers their blood pressure,” says Shelley. “It proves that gossiping is good for you.” I want to ask if Aaron and S-John are still around, but decide I don’t really care that much.

Karen unwraps my foot and asks what happened. 

“I’ve been walking on it,” I say. 

“Yeah it’s pretty wet. At least you’re honest.” She takes the measurements and the wound is indeed twice as deep as it was two weeks ago. The secondary wound has somehow completely vanished though.

I ask Shelley how the kids are and she tells me about her little one’s fourth birthday party, for which she and her older daughter baked a cake in the shape of a raccoon, with sprinkles for fur. 

     She talks for a while about pumpkin spice. I don’t have any opinions one way of the other about it but find it ridiculous that it has become such a divisive topic, even if the outrage is exaggerated and performative. She says she read that most people that the appropriate date for pumpkin spice products to appear in stores is September first. She recently tried pumpkin spice goldfish crackers. “They were surprisingly good,” she says. Why are we still talking about this, I wonder.

Gladys comes in and points to a sore on my heel and asks, “What’s that?”

“A sore on my heel,” I say. 

“I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. You need to be really, really careful that doesn’t get worse.”

“So start going barefoot?”

“I’m serious. Your tendons are right there. Right under the surface.”

Doctor Taggert comes in and does her crazy dance and sings a tuneless song. She too asks what’s the matter with my foot and I tell her I’ve been walking on it. 

    “Well, try not to,” she says. “We have you down for a cast but everything’s backed up. Scheduling has gotten…” she looks at Gladys.

    “Complicated,” says Gladys, looking worried. 

    “Complicated. How often are you changing it?” Taggert asks. 

    “Every couple of days,” I say. In reality I have hardly been able to bring myself to look at the festering thing. The stench of the discharge sickens me, and yet I feel paralyzed to even unwrap it more than once a week.

    “It’s really wet, you should be changing it daily. Did they send you supplies?” she asks. I tell her they did, though they charged me and it was really expensive. I had been shocked when the tiny box arrived with its handful of the good foam bandages and a few packets of Aquacel, the absorbent pads you stick underneath them. 

    “Well you haven’t met your deductible yet. You know how it is, they will charge you as much as humanly possible for everything. Try Amazon.”

    Taggert carves the callouses and we laugh a bit then she goes and leaves me alone with Shelley, who cuts a new insert for my shoe and bandages my foot. After a few minutes Gladys reappears, chewing on sour gummy worms. “Here I spend all day telling people to watch their blood sugar and then I eat a whole bag of these things for dinner. It’s amazing that I’m not diabetic.”

“Not yet,” I say.

    “Hey, I’m a wunnuh,” she says, her mouth full of worms. “I meed lopf of fugah.”

     “Do they make pumpkin spice ones?” I ask. Gladys mumbles something I can’t make out. 

     “I don’t know but I would try those,” says Shelley, then hands me the leftover scrap of Aquacel, tucked in its foil pocket. I tell her I’m saving them up to make a life-sized bust of Dr. Taggert. They all howl. “It’s going to be tricky though, I don’t know what she looks like without a mask.”

    “Well take a look. We’ve got all our pictures hanging here now,” says Gladys, and points to two rows of photos hanging across from the reception desk. I barely recognize anyone; they all look glamorous with lots of make up and fancy hairstyles. Dr. Thompson’s face is so brightly lit she looks Caucasian.

    “I think we all look pretty nice,” says Gladys. 

    “You all look beautiful,” I say. “See you next week.”  

 

New Episodes Now Streaming

    Even though I told numerous coworkers I had to leave at 11:30 sharp, no one shows up to relieve me, so I call the control room and tell them I need to catch my bus. The officer who answers the phone sounds like he’s not sure who I am. Hoping I don’t get in trouble, I hang up and roll off down the hill to the bus mall on my scooter, which I’ve finally started using. 

Sitting across from me on the bus is a blind man wearing a Gang of Four t-shirt. “Saw them earlier this year,” he says. “This was their last tour.” He gets off, swinging his cane wildly. He is replaced by a gargantuan mother and her equally huge offspring, who take up five seats and don’t get off their devices until they reach the hospital stop, at which point she barks, “Put that fucking thing away.” They push past me to get off the bus, then waddle in front of me down the steep hill toward the main entrance, leaving me no room to pass. Thankfully, I’m early. 

The metal detector is once again taped off; I wonder if they ever use it. How is Luigi doing, I wonder. I’ve forgotten to bring a mask, but there don’t seem to be any dispensers anywhere. The cute older woman is the only one at the desk, and she is talking loudly on the phone with someone who seems to need to know every detail of the admitting process. Eventually someone else comes out of the back, and I ask her if she has any masks and she says no. 

Like the obese family, the man driving the people mover has parked his vehicle so that people can barely squeeze past. I smack the hood as I wheel past and he starts as if he was asleep. 

I roll past the Starbucks, around the corner, up the Green Elevator, and plop down on a chair in the waiting area. The new receptionist, whose name I forget, passes on her way into the office and says she’ll get me checked in. Her perfume smells like bubble gum. 

As I sit there, I look at the blue door button, the Clinical Decision Unit sign, the photograph of the Tower of Babel. Only one thing is new; a large black banner with gold lettering beside the office door.

Congratulations our care team award honorees!

The care team of the month award recognizes any team who exemplifies our Providence Mission and Values and dedicates a caring attitude to 

And so on. 

A half hour later one of the nurses comes out to get me. I can’t remember her name, either. Luckily, when I ask if there’s anything new in the office, she says, “Well I’m not the only Karen anymore. But she spells hers with a Y.” I pass Vicky and Kaitlin and Gladys as she leads me to Room Two. I ask if I can have a mask, and she brings me a bright purple one. She wheels my scooter away then looks at my foot and the two wounds on it. One is very recent, but the other has been there since March. Barely a week after Taggert released me, a small blister had opened up. Over the past five months it has  blossomed into a ragged mess. 

“Does it usually leak this much?” Karen asks. I say yes, and tell her how I knew I should have come in earlier but I just kept putting it off. 

“I know it was stupid. I just couldn’t bear to come back in. I needed a break.”

“I understand,” she says. “It doesn’t look great, but it’ll look better once she cleans it up.”

“I’m so embarrassed.”

“But none of this is your fault.”

I try to make small talk with her, but while I’ve warmed up to her over the past yaer, it’s still difficult to get her to respond in more than monosyllables. She would make a perfect spy, not just because of her reticence but because she is so nondescript no one would ever notice or remember her. 

I hear Dr. Taggert in the next curtained room. “Guess what?” she cries. “We don’t need to see you anymore! Of course you’re always welcome to call or come back for anything.” The man she’s talking with has a pleasant voice and sounds about my age; it’s like I’m being brought in to replace him. Or he’s being pushed out to make room for me. Either way, I envy him. 

After measuring the wounds and putting numbing cream on my foot and doing a lot of typing, Karen asks if I need anything and leaves. I let myself sink back into the familiar surroundings. The wooden crucifix that looks like it’s flapping its hands, the Visiplex clock, the gloves reaching out of their boxes. The beige curtain with its declarations of Peace and Joy. Speak Your Truth it reads, backwards and forwards and upside down. 

Then the curtain is thrust aside, just like old times, and once again let’s have a big round of applause because Heeeere’s Taggert! She surprises me by running up and hugging me. No, she is not upset that my foot is fucked up again. No, she’s not going to scold me for not coming in right away, though she wants me to know that just like my predecessor in Room One I can come and see them anytime I need anything. The whole time she is so nice I want to cry. “It’s so good to see you,” she keeps saying. “We missed you so much.” 

For the first time, I think maybe it’s okay that this is happening. Even if it isn’t, it would be foolish of me not to take what affection I can get, because over the last five months I feel like I have been dying of loneliness. It’s been an extremely busy summer, and I’ve been going out and doing things with people every weekend, but the disconnect I often feel between me and my fellow humans seems to be widening and I don’t know why or how to stop it. For the first time in a very long time, I don’t actually think there’s anything inherently wrong with me. But something is undoubtedly wrong. 

Taggert says she had a bunch of student nurses but all but one of them have disappeared. She asks if I mind if that last one comes in and watches. A lovely young woman comes in and watches the doctor debride the ever-loving shit out of my ravaged foot. Dear, dependable Gladys, twenty-six going on seventy, comes in as well, apparently just to hang out. Taggert keeps scraping at a particularly delicious callous on the side of the foot, then stopping herself, then scraping a little more before finally putting down her knife and saying she doesn’t want to overdo it. The whole time I keep making her laugh with what is unfortunately pretty stale material.

“I had to come back,” I tell her. “The way I left, there was no closure! If this was a TV show, everyone would be throwing their shoes at the screen. Speaking of which, my shoes suck.” She laughs and agrees that things were really weird at the end there. I can’t remember the last time I saw her in such a merry mood. 

“I hope this care team award nonsense hasn’t gone to your head,” I say.

“Isn’t that wild? They put our pictures up in the hall!” she screams. “One of our patients nominated us.” 

“Well it wasn’t me.” 

She asks if I want a cast and I say sure if she thinks I should have one. “I’ll have to run it through insurance first, of course,” she says. She talks to me about footwear, I tell her about my new endocrinologist, and then they all file out and Karen comes back in to apply Aquasel and some turquiose goo I’ve never seen before. She wraps me up and cuts out a foam pad for a new postop shoe. 

I ask how she held up during the strike. “I assume you all got enormous raises. I saw a bunch of shiny new cars in the lot.”

She sighs. “It was pretty rough,” she says.  

She doesn’t elaborate, so I ask, “You’ve been here a year now, right?”  

“Just had my anniversary,” she says. 

The others are all talking when I leave, so I just say goodbye to the new scheduler, whatever her name is, and roll off to catch the bus. When it rolls up, a woman in a hospital gown and slippers and nothing else, with her right hand wrapped in a bandage the size of a cantaloupe, pushes ahead of me to get on. “Downtown?” she screams at the driver, then sits down before he can answer. Her eyes flicker back and forth wildly. It’s good to be back. 

White Coat Syndrome

 I get off the bus and walk down the hill toward the hospital entrance. The last time I did this it was six months ago, and the days were cold and short. It’s only midmorning and it’s already uncomfortably warm out. An enormous woman in a mobility device is blocking the front doors. A woman with a walker asks if she can move a bit so she can get in. “I ain’t movin’ for nobody!” the woman bellows. The other woman squeezes behind her and I do the same. 

The x-ray machine and metal detector are wrapped in caution tape. A volunteer is stationed by the counter, directing people to the line. Clusters of guys in tactical gear stand here and there. I check in with a woman I don’t recognize and she directs me to the Tower Elevator. To get there I walk down a hallway lined with brightly colored paintings of various Portland landmarks, passing a café with a sign that says it’s closed until further notice. 

After a few wrong turns I find myself in the Endocrinology East/Weight Loss Clinic. I know that many type 2 diabetics struggle with their weight but it still feels weird that they combine the two.. 

I check in and give the guy my new insurance card. Our rates jumped so high that the museum changed providers. I’m a little nervous because this is the first time I’ve used the new card, but it all goes fine and my copay turns out to be the same as before.

I take a seat and look around. The room is long and narrow, and everything is tan. One wall is covered with a wallpaper photo of Crown Point Vista in autumn. Next to an empty glass case stands a tropical plant with leaves like outspread hands. An open door reveals a closet filled with brightly colored blouses marked XL, 2X, 3X, 4X, and finally 5X. There are three other people waiting and none of them look like they’re here to lose weight. An older, deeply tanned woman cackles at a video on her phone, then looks deeply serious, then cackles again. I feel like I’m in a David Lynch movie.

I only have to sit for a few minutes before they call my name. On the other side of the door is an astonishingly long corridor lined with identical doors. The aide leads me to a tiny examination room and takes my blood pressure and pulls some blood to check my glucose levels. My blood pressure is high and I tell her it’s probably because I’m so nervous. “Probably white coat syndrome,” she says, and I’m reminded of the first time I heard that term, down in wound care. I know it’s referring to doctors in general but I can’t help but think of people saying “The men in white coats will come for you,” meaning of course that you’re being taken to a mental hospital. 

She leaves and another woman arrives immediately. I’m not used to being helped so quickly. Her name is Barbara and I feel immediately at ease with her. She asks me if I’m here for a specific issue and I tell her that I really just need help managing things and that I’m also struggling with chronic foot ulcers that open up the moment they’ve healed. When Dr. Taggert released me, I developed a blister a week later, and despite my babying it, it soon blossomed into a full-blown ulcer. I couldn’t bear to go back to the clinic, and for the past six months I’ve been struggling to get up the nerve to call them. In the meantime I pretended everything was fine, even though I was constantly gnawed on by fear. 

She downloads the information from my glucose reader and talks to me about the results and some options for bringing my sugars down. She asks if I would be interested in an insulin pump and I say yes but that all my past doctors had been reluctant to help me get one. She says she will connect me to their nutrition education who will talk to me about the options for getting a pump, as well as go over some dietary suggestions with me. Barbara asks me a lot of questions and then she leaves and returns a minute later with Dr. Jackson. 

He pretty much repeats all the points Barbara made, and tells me I should make an appointment with wound care. I thank him and leave. Wound Care is only two floors down and right around the corner, but it's not accessible from here, so I have to go all the way down to the first floor and weave my way through the complex, past the shuttered café, past the irritatingly cheery paintings, past the people mover, its driver looking like he’s falling asleep, past groups of security guards hurrying to respond to a Code Gray, until I find the Green Elevators. 

I realize my heart is pounding as I get off on the fourth floor. There is now a key pad on the door to the Wound Care department, with a  sign that reads, “Press the blue button to enter.” I press the blue button and the door swings open. Everyone turns to look to see who’s there.

“Holy crap,” says Gladys. “Did you stop by to say hi?”

“I wish. I need to make an appointment,” I say, flooded with shame. 

“Sure thing, Bella is… I don’t know where Bella is. She’ll be back. What’s going on?”

“I missed you all so much I gave myself another ulcer. How are you?”

“Big life changes,” she says. “Dumped the boy Looking for a new place to live..” She looks tired, and older than 26. 

The glass has been taken down from the front counter. An Oscar figurine is standing beside the bell. Standing next to Gladys is… oh god, what’s her name?  I can’t think of it. Shelley is also back there with a woman I’ve never seen before. She glances at me and turns away, flipping her ponytail contemptuously.

“Well well well, look what the cat dragged in!” CK jumps out from around the corner, holds up her hand for a high five. “Come on, don’t leave me hanging.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on strike?” I say, overcoming my legendary dislike of high-fives to pat her little palm.

“Please, not again,” she says, pulling down her mask. I ask how Cathy is. 

“I accidentally locked her outside overnight the other night. I had too much wine. I feel so terrible. I’m such a bad mother.”

“But hey, at least you won an Oscar?” I say, pointing. 

“One of our patients brought that in yesterday,” she said. “He left it blank so we can put our names on it. Mine will be biggest, of course.”

Dr. Thompson appears. “Well hello there!” she says. “How are you doing?”

“Really good!” I say. “I mean, except for the foot.” She stares at me. 

“Your eyes look good at least,” she says at last. I forgot that the last time I saw her, I hadn’t had my second cataract operation yet. That feels like years ago. “Well, talk to Bella, we’ll fit you in no problem. Where is Bella?” Gladys shrugs. 

“I’m here,” says Bella. Gladys introduces us and I say we met already, while they were on strike. Bella pulls up the schedule and says they can see me Monday, but I tell her I need a few weeks to give notice at work. She fits me in a few weeks from now and Dr. Thompson says she’ll see me then. I say I hope so, and I do; I don’t feel up to dealing with the well-intentioned screeching of Dr. Taggert. 

I want to stay and catch up with everyone. I miss them all so much, miss people lavishing care on me, miss the banter. I feel so changed, though I’m not sure how exactly, or why. The past six months have been fairly uneventful, aside from our precious democracy’s rapid transformation into a fascist oligarchy. But I feel like a different person than the one who walked out of here six months ago. I feel like I’m an actor playing that role, a drunken hack, moving woodenly and flubbing my lines. Most days I feel like I’m unraveling, breaking apart piece by piece, waiting for the men in the white coats to come sweep up the crumbs. 

I head back down the elevator and leave by the side entrance, which still has not been closed up like they keep threatening. I cross the parking lot where the baby goats were, where my friends used to pick me up and drop me off for my hyperbaric treatments, and cross the street, where a guy with a leaf blower blasts a cloud of dust into my face and tells me to look where I’m going, though to be honest I really don’t want to.