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.”
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