Dolly

    The old bus shelters in downtown Portland huge bulbous ovals with translucent bubble roofs, all brown, seventies retrofuturism at its zenith. A few years after I moved here they replaced them all with minimalist slabs of glass to keep homeless people from huddling inside them. Aside from having no character, these new bus stops are no protection at all from the rain, especially the way it’s raining today, driving sheets blown sideways by the wind. By the time my bus arrives, I’m drenched. Amazing to live in a world that hates homeless people so much it’s willing to make everyone else wet and miserable in its efforts to shoo them away. 

    I attempt to doze on the bus without much success. I disembark, roll down the hill, and stop outside the hospital to peel the thick layers of gluey leaves from my scooter wheels. 

    I get the usual woman at the counter and spew out my name and date of birth before she can say anything. “You didn’t give me a chance to guess,” she says. 

    “Next week,” I promise.

    Karen opens the door for me immediately, looking cozy in a fuzzy pink Columbia jacket. Rogue wisps of hair curl out from her pulled-back hair. She asks me how my trip was and I tell her and she says, “Hoo boy.” 

    My blood pressure is high but she says she’ll retake it when we’re done. She unwinds my poorly-wrapped bandages and says, “Huh. This looks…” She pokes at the bottom of my foot a bit then calls, “Shelley? Can I borrow your eyes?”

    Shelley comes in and says that it looks healed over. “I thought so too,” says Karan. “I can’t tell what’s under there though, so I’m going to wait for the doctor before I enter anything.” Just as she smears the Lidocayne on the foot, Dr. Thompson pokes her head in. She’s wearing her Baby Yoda cap. She asks how my trip was and I tell her and she shakes her head. 

    She leaves and the shoe guy appears, surprising me. He holds my new insert in his hand. “I just wanted to double check where the hot spots are,” he says. He holds the insert up to my foot, takes it away, makes some marks on it in pencil. He shows me how he’s made the arch extra high to take more of the weight off the front. He says he’ll see me in a week or two and vanishes as suddenly as he appeared.

    The doctor comes back in, followed by Vicki and Karen. She wipes off the Lidocayne and starts carving carefully at the callus. She tried to blow a crumb of skin off the end of her knife, bust since she has a mask on, nothing happens. She laughs. “What was I thinking?” 

Karen laughs too, and says she worked in a respiratory pediatric ward for a while, and the kids would blow out their birthday candles by undoing their tracheotomy tubes. “There’s lots of footage on TikTok if you want to see,” she says. I don’t really want to see.

The doctor cuts slowly and cautiously and says, “It’s hard all the way through. There’s no wound here.” 

    “Hooray!” says Vicki. Karen beams. 

    “So what did we decide to go with, football?” the doctor asks Vicki. 

    “Football,” she confirms. 

    “I know I was skeptical at first,” the doctor says, “But I’m glad I let you guys talk me into doing these. They really are better than those stupid soft casts.” She tells me she doesn’t want to cut too much callus because the skin around it is so raw, so she’ll to the rest next week. “I don’t want to leave it there too long though, it’s like having a stone in your shoe.”

    “Are the footballs new?” I ask Karen when the doctor leaves. 

    “Yeah,” she says, preparing the cotton batting. “We’ve only been doing them for a couple of omnths.”

    “What was wrong with the soft casts?” I ask. 

    “We hate the soft casts,” says Jenny, poking her head in. I ask her what was wrong with them but she just asks me how my trip was and I tell her. “Well whatever you did back there healed your foot up,” she says. She talks about her daughter’s new cat, and then her own cats, and then we talk about my cat. I ask Karen if she has a ny pets and she says she has a Daschund with alopecia named Dolly. 

    She finishes the football and fetches my scooter. Before I get on, she says, "Oh wait, your blood pressure." She takes it again and it's perfect. I don’t feel elated about the good news- I’m  not sure I’m capable of elation at this point- but I do feel good about it. It’s not even four but it’s nearly dark outside as I make my way up the hill in the rain, trying to avoid the sticks and acorn caps, accumulating a fresh skin of wet yellow leaves as I roll along.