Everyone in the office seems low-energy, even Dr. Taggert. I can’t get a laugh out of anyone, and feeling my energy being sapped, I eventually give up trying. CK’s either off or hidden away in hyperbarics.
Caitlin cuts off my football and is pleased to report that, while the wound isn’t any smaller, no drainage has seeped through and the flesh looks pink and healthy.
Tom from Evergreen Orthotics shows up like we had arranged, and he tells me about how the AFO works. He looks at my foot and says that most of the pressure will be put on my shin, and on the front of the sole. “It’ll be a little like having toes again,” he says. “It takes some getting use to, but after all you’ve been through, I bet you’re up for trying something new.”
He makes a mold of my entire foot up to my knee with some sort of quick-setting rubbery material, which he peels off and tucks into a satchel bursting with cloth and foam and a dozen pairs of specialty scissors. “They rummaged through it at the checkpoint downstairs and now it’s a total mess,” he says.
“Remember when Dr. Thompson snuck her knife past the guards?” asks Caitlin. “She was so proud of herself.” I picture her wielding a huge bowie knife but Taggert says it was just a little thing.
Tom says he’ll be back Monday with my brace, and Dr. Taggert applies my cast by herself. The nurses are all just kind of wandering aimlessly around the office.
“What’s with everybody?” I ask.
“It’s been a day,” says Taggert. “Now remember, call if anything feels off.”
“I know, I know. And if it’s off hours, go to the ER so they can saw it off.”
“You can call here off hours but you won’t get anybody, so feel free to leave a long, rambling message like some of our patients do.”
Overhearing, Caitlin yells, “Remember that guy who would call drunk all the time and leave those, um, colorful messages?”
“Oh my god yeah. He’d leave long, rambling messages for some woman named Rhonda. That went on for months. The lesson being, don’t drink and hit speed dial.”
Three days later I’m back. I’m hoping the drainage remains low enough that i can go back to coming once a week.
I set off the metal detector, but the guards don’t bother to wand me. The woman behind me says both her shoulders are made of metal but they don’t bother to wand her either.
Upstairs, I wait a while for them to get my room ready. A large family sits around a table, evidently waiting for someone. “Hey look, it’s 4:20,” says the son.
“Ha, I remember when that meant something, and not just once a year,” the father says. “You kids don’t know how easy you have it. Used to be you had to journey all the way across town and find some guy if you wanted to get high. Sometimes you’d smoke up all day and realize it was ten at night and you were out and had to go searching for more. You kids don’t know how easy you have it.”
“We’re ready for you, Seann Patrick,” says Bridget. “We’re in room one, Jenny’s waiting for you.”
“Oh no,” I say.
“Hi Seann!” cries Karen.
“Hey! How’s Dolly!”
“She’s perfect. Want to see pictures?”
“How come you’re nice to everyone but me?” asks Jenny.
“Because you’re my favorite,” I say, as Karen runs over with her phone. Her beady-eyed dog stares blankly from a log on the beach.
“Then a bunch of us took the wieners paddleboarding, but Dolly couldn’t go because there were too many of us already.” She swipes to a photo of a bunch of lithe young women in bikinis with daschunds on paddleboards. Then Jenny fires up the saw and she dances off.
“Oh this looks good,” she says. “Let’s say moderate, though it’s really much less.”
“What does it measure?” asks Bridget, staring at the computer like she is trying to remember what it is.
“Not today, we’re just casting,” she says.
“God I can hardly keep my eyes open,” says Bridget.
The top of my foot has a row of bright red bruises. Jenny says it was from the Optilock, the foam bandage they put on the wound. “It’s great stuff, but it’s got this thick edge that you can’t trim.” I’ve never had this happen before, but she’s not concerned so I’m not either.
“So today was baby goat day,” says Jenny.
“Ooh, are they still here?” I ask. I have warm memories of being here for baby goats day two years ago.
“No. In fact they left early, we didn’t even get to see them. Apparently the woman who brought them freaked out and they made her leave.”
Karen says, “I had just got down there and she was yelling, ‘they don’t think I’m friendly enough so I’m being escorted off the premises!’ She was not having a good day.”
“I hope to someday be escorted off the premises,” I say. “Hey, what do you all think of the room makeover?”
“I like the blue,” says Karen. “It’s like gazing out at the sky.”
“Bridget despises it,” says Jenny. “Don’t you?”
“Say what now?” asks Bridget groggily
“He wants to know what we think of the new room.”
“I despise it.” I tell her about my idea for a mural. She approves, and says, “I have a poster at home that reads ‘A wound neglected is a wound infected.’ You could put that in there somewhere.”
“You have wound care posters just hung up around your house?”
As she wraps my foot back up, Jenny tells Bridget she talked to sally.
“How’s she like the new job?” Bridget asks.
“Well, you know Sally. I’m not sure she likes anything. And it’s an hour drive so she’s not even saving any time on the commute.” I hadn’t even realized she was gone; once they made her supervisor she rarely emerged from the hyperbaric room. When you first arrive at a place, you assume everyone had been there forever and always will be. I think about this at work a lot, where after a number of tumultuous years I am one of the few old timers left.
Jenny leaves to call Dr. Thompson, who comes in and squats on her stool. Bridget stands there looking down at the bucket of water.
“What’s wrong?” asks the doctor.
“I couldn’t get the temperature right,” she says. “It really bugs me.”
The doctor dips her gloved fingers into the bucket. “It’s fine.”
“You know what people mean when they say something’s fine,” says Karen.
“It means they don’t want to tell you the truth,” I say.
“You probably know what it means in the Italian Job,” says the doctor, looking at me. “Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic, Emotional. Speaking of which, I still can’t get over that woman with the goats,” says Dr. Thompson. “I could see that she was in distress and I asked how she was doing…”
“You actually talked to her?” asks Karen.
“Yeah I was there for the whole thing. I love baby goats.”
“I thought with, you know, how you are about germs…”
“For the most part, animals are cleaner than humans. A dog’s mouth is cleaner than a human’s mouth.”
“But the goats walk around with all that poop on their butts,” says Karen.
“It’s cleaner than our poop. I asked how that woman was doing and she said, ‘I’ve got walking pneumonia, that’s how I’m doing! Do you need to know my whole life story?’ And then she picked up the goats, one under each arm, and kicked the gate open and stomped on out with them. She had to come back for the other two.”
“We kept hearing calls of a Code Gray at the west entrance,” says Jenny.
“She was definitely having issues. The attendants usually help people with the goats but she was just sitting there with her head in her hands. And then she screamed at one guy ‘Don’t hold them like that, you’ll break their backs’ But he was just holding it normally. The gaps seemed happy, anyway.” She shakes her head. “There weren’t any problems with the woman with the llamas yesterday.”
“I missed the llamas,” Bridget says.
“Are you running a petting zoo here?” I ask.
When she’s finished, Dr. Thompson tears off her smock and throws it into a bin in the new cupboard.
“That’s for linens,” says Bridget.
“Where’s the garbage then? I can’t get the hang of these new rooms,” says the doctor.
“I despise them,” says Bridget.
“Wound mural,” I say.
As my cast dries, they all gather in the main room to continue to excitedly discuss the baby goat incident. The whole thing has reinvigorated them; there is none of the office ennui I sensed just a few days ago.
“Oh shit, I keep forgetting,” I call from atop the chair, which no one has bothered to lower. “Doctor Thompson, can I get you to sign a form for a temporary handicapped parking permit?” Jenny brings my scooter and lowers the chair so I can fish the form out of my bag. The doctor signs it and Jenny makes a copy and I’m free until Monday. I leave by the side entrance and cross the parking lot, which was recently the scene of such goat-related melodrama. It’s quiet now, the only sign of life an old guy in a Primus t-shirt, smoking, who tells me I’ve got a sweet ride as I scoot by.
