The routine is getting dull, and yet there is no end in sight. I feel like I’m trapped in a hospital show well past its expiration date, like Scrubs. (I’ve never seen a single episode, but I’m assured this is true.) Every Thursday I check in at the front desk, take the elevator to the fourth floor, am greeted by Shelly, and plop down on the chair in the middle room. I am always the last patient of the day, and most of the rest of the staff has left. The few that remain busy themselves with doing inventories of bandages and ointments. These people have become family to me, and as family members inevitably do, they have started to irritate me.
For instance, I’m tired of Shelly only ever talking about herself. She has never asked me a single question aside from “have you changed medications” or “do you have any upcoming appointments.” The new nurse, Catherine, is assisting again this week. She has the personality of a sponge. Shelly lets her cut my cast off, and she does fine but takes a long time since she’s never done it before. “It’s always good to be someone’s first,” I say. She doesn’t respond.
Free of its cage, my leg is soft and chalky, and a shower of white flakes flutters onto the chair when I rub it. I wish Shelly would rub cream on it like some of the nurses do but she doesn’t because she’s Shelly. So I just enjoy the novelty of being able to twist my ankle until Dr. Ronda comes in.
I ask her how she is and she says, “I’m having an annoying day.” The wound on my right toe has gotten wider and deeper, though Shelly insists that it’s filled with clean, healthy tissue. The doctor asks her when I had my last culture taken from it. Shelly flips through my file but she doesn’t find anything, because I’ve never had a culture taken of it.
Dr. Ronda shakes her head and slides a long cotton swab on a stick from a plastic tube, and, saying “Ouch” to warn me, digs it into the open sore. “I don’t understand why this isn’t healing up,” she says. “Maybe this will tell us.” I ask her if I should get my shoes adjusted again and she says yes.
As she prepares the undercoating for my new cast, Shelly complains that her mask is bugging her. It’s one of those heavy-duty N95 ones. She says she needs it because her husband has COVID. “It’s his first time!” she says. I say congratulations. She says the first time she had it, she was breastfeeding her youngest, who of course caught it, but was fine. “I was nursing for two,” she says, explaining that an acquaintance of hers wasn’t able to produce milk. “It was probably the thing in my life that I’m proudest of.” Her slights breasts are barely noticeable through her scrubs. I don’t know what to say.
The doctor comes back in and puts on the new cast. She tells a story about a drunk man who came into the emergency room she worked in years ago. “Drunk people always say they had three beers. Every time it’s ‘Three beers, doc, I swear.’ But when I asked this guy how much he’d had to drink, he smiled at me and said ‘a lot. A whole lot.’ I had to respect that.”
She tells a couple of very mildly amusing anecdotes her pastor told her. For the first time I think she looks ridiculous in her yellow paper gown, gigantic blue slippers, and African pillbox cap. As she sloshes water around and once again enshrouds my poor, pasty leg, I think about how tired I am of her, of Shelley, even of the Sponge, new though she has barely been working long enough for me to get sick of her. She’s not right for the part, she’s been badly miscast, pardon the pun. She’s just one more sign that it’s time to pull the plug on this fucking show before it jumps the shark.
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