A Dent in the Dishwasher

  The metal detector is once again in service, and this time I remember to take everything out of my pockets before rolling through. Am I the only one who finds that these props and performances make me feel more stifled than safe? As if I need another reminder that we live in a country that would rather install machines and pay thugs rather than stop letting people buy fucking guns.

Shelley has a big smile for me, and says that they’re preparing my room. When Caitlin comes to get me, I refuse to look up from my phone. 

“Oh, so it’s going to be like this, is it?” She asks. 

I sit there for another moment before saying “Oh, hey, I didn't see you there.”

“Just get in here.”

Everything in Room One has been rearranged. The chair is further back and the white board is on the opposite wall. The walls themselves have been painted, one blue and the others beige. 

“This is the big new paint job?” I ask.

“Yup. We’re not fans,” she says.

 “Why are they different colors?” I launch again into my routine about painting a mural of wounds, which she of course thinks is brilliant.

“Now you’re in for it!” screams CK. Her eyes are sparkling and crinkling with laugh lines. It’s ridiculous how happy I am to see her, how good it feels to have the three of us in this room again. Recently my already-severe loneliness has metastasized. After not seeing her for months, CK looks like a homecoming queen.

“By the way, Jenny and Gretchen say hi,” she says. “They saw you were on the schedule.”

Caitlin says the wound doesn’t look too bad. I tell her I’ve been trying to be careful, but that I have to walk a bit at work. “Yeah, that skin stays delicate for a while,” she says. “You have new shoes, right?” I tell her I haven’t even had a chance to wear them out of the house yet. 

She sits at the computer while CK measures the wound. “Point nine, possibly one point oh,” she says. “I can’t tell.”

“Pretty sure it’s point nine,” I say. “Possibly even point eight.”

“Well if someone would hold their foot straight then maybe I could measure it properly.”

“Is there undermining?” asks Caitlin. 

“No undermining. Hey, they’re redoing all the pipes in my condo!” She throws out her paper ruler and swab and bounces over to the side of my chair, where she repeatedly grabs my arm as she tells me the saga. “Everyone here is sick of hearing about this so I’ll torture you with it. It’s an old complex and they suddenly decide they have  to replace all the pipes. So first they did the kitchen, and they totally dented the dishwasher, then tried to deny it…”

Everything disappears except for a flouncing red ponytail, a  slender neck, a hand on my arm. 

You know, this is pretty pathetic, a voice inside myself says. 

Shut up and let me enjoy myself for once, I hiss. 

“So I picked white tile with gray grout,” she’s saying. “And because of the dishwasher thing, they're not charging me any extra to go all the way up to the ceiling! It’ll be nice to be able to take a shower again. I really reek.”

“I didn’t want to say anything. How’s Cathy?” I ask. 

“Oh she has a new suitor, a big black boy with these crazy green eyes…”

“Hello!” cries Dr. Taggert, coming through the curtain like a talk show host. “Your A1C is so good! You’re not diabetic anymore! I mean, you are, but way to go!”

“Well, sure, but then there’s this thing again,” I say. 

“I know but I wanted to start out positive.”

“Thanks. I still have work to do but it’s much better than it was, and I feel good about that.”

“You should! It’s really impressive. And this really doesn’t look too bad,” she says, unwrapping a scalpel and slicing the dead skin. Shelley slips in and takes a seat at the computer.

“Well, I didn’t wait months to come in this time,” I say. “I’m learning. Just very, very slowly. I’ve mostly been really good, but it’s hard to stay off it at work. I’ll probably have to get you to write a note for me to stay off it for a while, and I’m not sure if they’ll let me work through that.”

“Well they can’t fire you. You can sue!”

“No but it could complicate things, and I’m scared of that,” I say.

“Well once you have the shoes on, this shouldn’t happen,” says the doctor. “But I know the in-between time is tricky. Have you heard of an AFO?”

“You mean we’re going to use alien technology?” I say excitedly.

“Ha, AFO, not UFO. It’s a sort of brace that is made that wrap around the bottom of your foot so you don’t put pressure on the front part.”

“Wow, that sounds like exactly what I need.”

Shelley turns the monitor screen to face me. She has the Amazon screen pulled up, with various forms of braces. They don’t honestly look all that bad.

“What does AFO stand for?” I ask. 

“You know what, I don’t know,” the doctor says. 

“Ankle foot orthosis,” reads Shelley.

“Not orthotic?” asks the doctor.

“Orthosis.”

“Huh. Anyways, Evergreen should be able to get you fitted for one. The trick is I don’t know if insurance covers them. But I can send them a referral if you’re interested.”

“Are you kidding? Let’s try it,” I say. Why the hell haven’t we tried it before, the little voice in my head asks.

Shh, I tell it. This is not the time for that. 

But seriously, it insists. Doesn’t this sound like something that would’ve been helpful since the first time we healed up? Why the hell didn’t she…

We’ll discuss this later, I say. 

Yes but…

LATER.

“So we’ll hold off on putting you in a TCC until Evergreen can see you. I mean, if that’s what you want.”

“If you think that’s best, I’m fine with a cast.” 

“Okay good. In the meantime we’ll put you in a football. I’ll send this out and you should call them in a few days. In the meantime Dede or Perez will call you to make your next appointment.” 

“You’ll probably make it on a Thursday because you hate us so much,” says CK.

“It wasn’t my fault!” I whine. “Dede kept saying that was all she had! You know you’re both my favorites. I think she’s trying to keep me from you.”

“She might be,” KC says. 

“And Thursdays are so…quiet!” I say.

“Yeah, a certain other doctor here doesn’t like laughter,” says Caitlin, wrapping my foot in a football. 

“I’ve noticed that,” I say. “Though I’ve barely seen her this year what with her being away. It’s been mostly substitutes, which honestly has not been great. And when I left it was so anticlimactic. There was no closure. I mean, on my foot there was. But there should’ve been a party to celebrate my graduation. A parade through the corridors!” 

Encouraged by their laughter, I have become increasingly boisterous. The prodigal patient has returned. Girls are flirting with me, my blood sugar is stabilized, and there’s a new device for me to try that might actually help with the healing. I am moving in the right direction (not a word, little voice). I am making progress (I said not one word, little voice). Everything (stop it) is going (I mean it) to be fine. 

KC runs to get my scooter and zooms around the office on it, whooping gleefully. I yell at her not to wreck it but she ignores me, and when she disappears around the corner I hear a crash.

I miss the bus, so I sit in the lobby and read for a while. I’m surprised to see that even though it’s close to six, the guard is still herding people through the metal detector, though he’s paying more attention to his phone. He doesn’t even look up when the alarms are set off by a man who walks right through and says, “This is such bullshit.” I feel so safe.

On the bus, an old man across the aisle smiles and laughs continuously to himself, a loud, forced “HA. HAHAHA. HA.” He continues to laugh until we get to where I make my transfer, at which point he gets up and hurries off the bus. 

“Hold on, I’ll get a little closer for you,” the driver tells me, and pulls up a few feet. 

The old man is standing there on the curb, waiting to get back on. I carefully disembark and he steps in, his face frozen in a deep scowl.

Everyone is losing their shit, the voice in my head says. I try to argue but I’m suddenly very tired. 

The Thompson Elk Returns Home After Years in Exile

It’s a perfect sunny day, and I take off my jacket and hang it over the handlebars of my knee scooter as I wait for the bus to take me across the river to my endocrinology appointment. All day I’ve been boiling with tension, a film of irritation covering a roiling sea of anxiety. It doesn’t help that the bus is running late. There are more bodies scattered across the sidewalks than I’ve seen in months.

At the first stop on Burnside, an old man in a motorized wheelchair gets on. I try to make room for him but he ends up backing up and smashing into my knees. I feel like yelling at him. 

I’m dismayed to see that the metal detector and x-ray machine are back up and running in the lobby of the hospital, manned by two beefy young men who look like they’re in high school. I put my bags in a plastic bin and instead of waving me around the detector they tell me to roll right through, causing the lights to flash. They run the wand over me and have me take everything out of my pockets, which I had forgotten to do. I roll down the hall to what they call the Tower elevators and notice for the first time that they only stop at four of the upper floors, the buttons in between are blacked out. By the time I make it up to the endocrinology/weight loss office I’m fifteen minutes late.

They call my name before I have a chance to get a good look at the waiting room. Without the Christmas decorations that were up during my last visit, it looks stark and barren. I step on the scale and just like last time it shows that I weigh much more than I expected. I’m not even wearing a cast this time. Am I really putting on that much weight? I don’t feel or look any different. But if the scale is right, I’m heavier than I’ve ever been. 

The aide pricks my finger so they can check my A1C levels, then disappears and a few minutes later the doctor arrives. I had been warned that Dr. Miller was booked solid and that I’d be seeing his assistant. Like the guards downstairs, she looks like she should be studying for the SATs. Her nametag has the same surname as one of the most toxic ghouls currently hollowing out the country from the White House. I’m tempted to make a joke about it but she seems very nice and very earnest. She tells me my A1C is 6.6 like it was last time, then connects her computer to the app for my glucose reader and walks me through what she sees. “You’re doing so much better, it looks like you’ve got things really under control,” she says. I have never had an endocrinologist tell me that in my life. I’m glad I didn’t joke about her name.

She asks what’s going on with my foot. In the three weeks since I was set free from wound care, I’ve been wearing a post-op shoe instead of my new orthotics. “You were almost healed up last time you were here…?” she asks, reading the screen. I tell her it finally healed, but after two weeks it opened up again, just like it always does. I say that after I see her I’m going to roll down to wound care to make an appointment. 

“I’m really frustrated,” I say, but to my surprise I don’t really feel that frustrated anymore, and I’m able to talk to her about it in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice. She is very kind and says that aside from my foot problems, I’m doing really well and that I should come back in four months. 

  When I roll up to the wound care clinic, I see through the window that there is an elderly couple with an ancient woman in a wheelchair at the counter, so I wait until they’re done then hit the good old blue handicap button and roll in. I’m surprised to see Perez behind the desk, sitting next to Gladys, who instantly gives me that disapproving look I’ve grown sort of fond of. 

“I’m back!” I cry. 

Dr. Thompson comes from around the corner and leans very close to me and asks, “How are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? The question is, are YOU okay?” She looks confused so I say, “The last time I saw you, you were about to have surgery.” She pulls down the front of her scrubs to show the base of her throat, which is lightly scarred, as if she’s had her thyroid removed. 

“I’m a robot now,” she says, which doesn’t sound like a thyroid issue. Throat cancer? “I’ll tell you about it later. You’re coming back to us?”

“I’m afraid so. It opened back up again. Even though I’ve been really good,” I say, looking at Evelyn. 

“I bet you have,” Gladys says, in a tone that could be either sarcastic or sympathetic. 

I have been, though. In the past month, the only time I’ve done any walking is at work, where I can’t avoid it. And even there I try to use my heel as much as possible to keep the pressure off the thin new skin where the wound was. But apparently I wasn’t careful enough, because after a few weeks, the skin started to tear open.

“The same spot?” she asks. 

“The same spot,” I say.

“Is it bad?” she asks. 

“Not really,” I say, feeling strangely lighthearted. For weeks I’ve been slipping deeper and deeper into despair, but being here, facing this maddening issue at last, is genuinely freeing. Plus, I’ve been so lonely. I hadn’t realized just how dependent I had become on my weekly visits to provide some social interaction. So I’m genuinely excited to see Original Karen appear from the back of the office and ask, “Is that Seann?” 

“Nope, just the bell inspector.” I adjust the three bells on the counter, my hand lingering a moment on the one I so recently rang. “Just as I suspected. I think you need a fourth one.” I pick up the Oscar statuette and shake it.

Perez searches for an opening, typing and frowning. 

“It’s tricky because we’re down a room,” says Original Karen. “We’re painting them.”

“Ooh, you should let me do a mural showing all the different kinds of wounds,” I say. 

“Yes!” cries Gladys. “And a hyperbaric chamber! It would look so cool!”

And at last Perez finds me a slot at the end of the day on Monday. I’m so relieved that I don’t even care that I won’t be giving work much notice. I need to start putting my health first. I suspect that the only thing that will truly heal this up is to take some time off again, or else find a way of doing my job without walking even a little bit, which I’m not sure is possible. I feel resigned to doing whatever I need to in order to get better, even if it costs me my job. 

Afterwards I roll across the street to get blood work done for Dr. Miller. Since I was here last, the lab was taken over by the evil corporate monster Labcorp, and they have installed automatic check-in kiosks that require you to scan your photo ID and insurance card before you can talk to anyone. The fascist police state is firing on all cylinders these days.

I’m finally called up to the counter and told it’ll be a fifteen or twenty minute wait. I watch as patients are called in one by one before me, and finally take out my sketchbook.  

At some point the lab tech calls, “Rosie? Is there a Rosie?” An elderly Black woman and a young white father with a little girl both stand up at once. “Rosie R.,” the tech says. 

“I’m Rosie R,” says the old woman. 

“So are we,” says the young man. “Well, I’m not, but my daughter is.”

“How about Rosie Ross, then,” the tech says, and the man and the little girl follow her in. 

The old woman takes her seat, chuckling, “What are the odds?” 

I wait for over an hour until they call me. The tech is astonishingly fast. When I leave, line to check in stretches out the door and down the hallway. 

I catch the bus and make my connection into downtown. It’s only been three weeks and here I am, back on the merry go round of what will no doubt be a long series of weekly appointments. As we turn off Main Street, I see that the barricades and caution tape that have been littering the block for months have been removed, and that the bronze Thompson Elk statue, damaged during the Black Lives Matter protests, has at last been put back in its place. It’s been six years since they took it down to restore it, six years since the protests, six years since the beginning of COVID. It’s genuinely comforting to see the beloved stag once again standing with antlers held high beneath the trees. I wonder if he is shocked to find that in his absence the society he gazed down upon for a hundred years seems on the verge of collapse.