Amnesiac

     Thursday afternoon, a coworker surprises me by arriving early to relieve me so I can leave for my appointment. It's nice not to have to rush down to the bus stop, but once I'm there I find that the bus is running late. 

    Karen leads me in to room two, where Jenny is waiting. I don’t feel any of the dread or despair of last week, despite the fact that my cultures did in fact come back positive for MRSA and another bacterium called proteus miribilis. All day I’ve been nervous about my appointment, but now that I’m here, I exhibit signs of a sort of nihilistic perkiness. 

    “It doesn’t look great,” I warn Karen. The last time I changed the bandage, the wound was huge and inflamed and rimmed with dead white skin.

    “Oh my,” says Jenny.

    “Yep,” I say. “Worse than ever.”

    “I don’t know”, says Karen. “A lot of this is callus. It doesn’t actually look any bigger than last week. She measures it. “Okay, maybe a little bit bigger.” 

    “Yeah I’ve pretty much given up hope of it ever healing,” I say cheerfully. “It’s kind of freeing.”

    “Don't make me smack you,” says Jenny. “She’s right, it really doesn’t look that bad. And it’ll look even better once the doctor cleans it up. And then you’ll get your cast on Monday and things will turn right around.”

    “But it was almost completely healed,” I say. “Twice. And now look at it.”

    “Apples and oranges,” she says. “Think of this as a new beginning,” she says. “We’re starting fresh.” 

    I laugh. “But what about all this time I’ve wasted up to now? All this time on the scooter, coming in here every week, only for it to get worse and worse. What was any of it for?”

    “Apples and oranges,” she says again.

“I don’t know what that means,” I say. 

    I have no more surprise or disappointment left in me so when Doctor Baylor comes in I greet her warmly. She doesn’t seem concerned about the wound or the infection, just cuts the callus -there is a lot of blood- and tells me in a chipper tone of voice that she’s prescribing me a different antibiotic to battle the proteus miribilis. When she leaves I ask Jenny if Dr. Thompson is still in Sri Lanka. 

    “Yeah, she’ll be gone for three weeks.” I tell her it’s already been three weeks. “No, she just left last week,” she says. 

    “But this is my third week with Baylor” I say. 

    “No, she’s only going to be gone three weeks.” 

    "So she'll be back next week."

    "No, she'll still be in Sri Lanka."

    To keep my head from exploding, I ask her how Dave is. She shows me pictures of the lanky blond tomcat. His fleecy fur looks like spun gold in the sunlight. 

    And the sun is shining a half hour later when I roll up the hill to the bus stop. The days are getting longer, if not warmer. So what if the past six months of appointments have been for nothing? It’s not really all just a pointless waste, is it? And even if it is, what good does it do to fixate on that? I’ve done the best I could and it wasn’t enough. The hole is larger than ever, I'm months away from even being close to healed up. And who knows how long that will last. A week? Two weeks? 

    But Monday is a new beginning. I can pretend none of this ever happened, that I’m preparing for my first day of treatment in an office I’ve never been to before, with a brand new team of doctors and nurses to get acquainted with. It’s all very exciting! I will wheel into that office like an amnesiac anxious to learn about this life he has no memory of having lived. 

*

The next day I leave work early again for my eye appointment. I haven’t had one since summertime; what with my weekly wound care visits, then vacation, then the holidays, I just didn’t feel up for it. But I need to get back on the eye-stabbing wagon.  

I sit in the big waiting room until I’m called, then stare into the mirror and recite the diminishing lines of the illuminated Snellin chart mounted on the wall behind me. I open my eyes wide as they check my eye pressure with an instrument the size of a pen. I sit in the waiting room for a while longer, follow the technician into a tiny dark room, gaze into the box at the blue circle and flickering red horizon line. I roll off to squeeze into the tiny waiting room. I could do this in my sleep.

    As I open my sketchbook, a baritone voice rumbles, “Hey, Seann.” I look up and see Mark from the Goose there. I feel vertigo that comes from seeing someone out of their usual habitat. I ask what he’s there for and he says he’s having some issues. He doesn’t elaborate. Mark used to be a submarine captain. I ask him a few questions and he answers them and then I go back to drawing. I can tell he’s nervous. In a few minutes they call his name and I wish him luck. 

    An elderly man sitting across the room takes the chair next to me so a couple can sit together. He watches me drawing intently, and eventually starts making small talk. He is a mechanical engineer from Missouri, friendly enough though not terribly interesting. I ask what kinds of things he worked on and he says he received a patent for a sewer pipe fitting. "It proved quite lucrative," he says. 

    In time they call him, and finally it’s my turn. An assistant administers the numbing drops, then leaves and comes back and administers more. She’s kind of blandly pretty, and when she turns her back I have an urge to grab her ass. After quite a while she returns. “The doctor’s dealing with an emergency, but you’re next,” she says. “In the meantime, I need to give you more drops.” 

    Finally the doctor comes flying in, gives me some more drops, flies away.

    After a long time, he dashes back in and uncaps the syringe and slides it into my eye. A blood-rimmed bubble blooms instantly in my vision. I must make a face, because in a concerned tone of voice he asks, “You doing okay?” 

    “I’m okay,” I say. 

    And I am. I’m alone and miserable and wracked with loss and tired of the endless medical drama and repulsed by all the loathsome acts being perpetrated in this country by all these cretinous buffoons, sick of the cringe and the cruelty and the sheer batshit craziness of it all… but aside from that, I’m doing okay. As I mount my scooter, my trusty wheeled steed with its ragged tires and wobbly handlebars, I look into the mirror at the Snellen chart. When lit, it’s a scrambled alphabet that spell nothing as it shrinks to the point of illegibility. Turned off, it’s just a black rectangle, all its backwards letters lost in the darkness. But still there.