Banana

 I take a long weekend off and head to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland with the Widder, Robyn, and Robyn’s boyfriend. Ashland is a charming town nestled in the mountains, and despite the sloping sidewalks I don’t have any trouble getting around with my scooter. 

We get back Monday afternoon and I take the light rail from the airport directly to my wound care appointment, luggage weighing down my handlebars. Tim, the free-agent nurse the departments are always fighting over, saws off my cast and says the wound is looking good. 

When she’s through debriding, I ask Dr. Taggert about her trip with he son to Panama. They went there through an organization called Floating Doctors, and slept in hammocks and ate nothing but plantains. She shows me photos taken on the tiny island where she had treated patients for various ailments, most of them related to parasites. “This is our waiting room,” she says, pointing to a row of pregnant women sitting on folding chairs beneath the trees.  “And here is our OR.” She points to a thatched roof on stilts. “No one has diabetes there because if they get it they just die,” she says. “They die of all kinds of preventable stuff. I like being able to help out a little but to be honest it’s pretty grim.”

A few days later I get a call from Tom at Evergreen Prosthetics and Orthotics and we arrange for him to come to my next appointment, which will be on Tuesday instead of Monday, due to Memorial Day. He says he has made the brace and wants to see how it fits.

I run into him in front of the hospital as I’m heading in to my appointment. He’s heading out to his car and says he’ll be up in a few minutes. 

The two guards at the entrance have me put my bag through the x-ray machine but don’t bother to wand me after I roll through the metal detector. I could be hiding a gun in every pocket. 

Upstairs, Karen immediately says they’re ready for me and I glide right in. She says she hasn’t done a cast in a while, then cuts through the fiberglass as if it’s butter, which it is also the color of. The saw’s exhaust fan makes the curtain ripple wildly.

Karen rips off the batting and plucks off the square of padding. I can see that it is completely dry. 

She looks puzzled, and gently prods the wound.

“I’m not sure but it looks like you’re completely closed up,” she says. “I mean, there’s no drainage. Nope, I am just not seeing a wound here.” I twist my leg to get a look. There is still an indentation, inside of which is a layer of smooth, pink skin. 

“Well I’ll be damned,” I say.

Old Karen comes in and says, “I haven’t seen you in a while. What’s new?”

I start to tell her about Ashland but I can tell she’s not really interested. “What’s new with you?” I ask. 

“Nothing. Oh, that’s not true, we got a dog,” she says, and shows me pictures of her adorably morose-looking puggle. “She’s thirteen. Her name was Bea but we started calling her Nana, because she’s an old lady, then it became Bea Nana and now it’s just Banana.” 

When Dr. Taggert comes in, she is pleased to see me healed up, and as she slices at the callus she sings, “It’s the final countdown! Da-da DA duh, da-da DA da duhhh...”

Just then Tom shows up, and Taggert steps aside to watch, grilling him as he opens his bag and takes out my new brace. It’s made of clear molded plastic rather than metal like I had pictured. He examines my wound then slips the brace onto my foot and makes some marks on it with a silver Sharpie.

“It’s weird, I just don’t know why it keeps opening up in that spot,” he says. “Usually people have problems on the side here.” I ask if he thinks the bone might have gotten calcified again, like it has in the past, and he says he doesn’t think so, though I don't know how he can tell without an x-ray. He asks if I brought my other shoe, and I ask one of the Karens to get it from my bag. “It’s a shame we couldn’t fix this with the orthotic,” he says.

“I didn’t really get a chance to use it,” I say. “It opened up before I even broke it in.”

“Well hopefully if you use this for a while and it doesn’t open up, we can go back and try again.” 

“Isn't that plastic kind of hard?” Taggert asks. “His skin is very delicate.”

“It’ll have a soft insert,” he says, working the brace into the shoe and fiddling with the laces. “I’ll have it ready by the time I see you next week.” He puts the shoe with the brace into his bag and slips away. 

New Karen smears lotion on my pasty leg, which feels heavenly. Agnes comes in and plops into the chair. 

“I almost got murdered,” she says. 

“Oh my god, what happened?” I ask. “Are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I went on a date with this guy and he almost murdered me. He didn’t like when I told him I didn't want to see him again. Then I went home and when I woke up the next day there was graffiti on my car.”

“Wow. What did the graffiti say?”

“I couldn’t tell,” she says. “And I’m not a hundred percent certain it was him. But Karen’s got a boyfriend.”

“Congratulations,” I say, a little confused that Agnes’s story about almost getting murdered didn’t seem to involve anything resembling her almost getting murdered. “What does Dolly think of him?”

“She likes him more than she likes me,” Karen grumbles. “I’m a little peeved about it. She totally ignores me when he’s in the room.”

Agnes mutters something about becoming a spinster, then slouches away. Karen wraps my leg then admires her handiwork. It looks perfect, as does the cast Taggert proceeds to wrap over it. It’s gratifying to see your body subjected to such high levels of craftsmanship. 

“Evergreen guy sure left in a hurry,” Taggert says. “Think I scared him off with my questions? I can’t help it, I just like to know things!” I imagine her beneath the palm trees, in a tropical paradise rife with suffering, screeching at an interpreter as she tries to explain to the poor islanders how antibiotics work. I assume she doesn’t tell them that even though there is in fact medicine to treat diabetes, they can’t have any. 

If I had been born on that island, I would have died nearly forty years ago.