I Think I'll Take That Second Opinion Now

There's nothing like a good psychotic doctor for inspiration...

I was sitting in a small white room.  As is law in a doctor’s office, it was a sultry thirty degrees or so.  Wearing the patient uniform, a less-than-fashionable paper dress, I sat on the little semi-padded table which they thoroughly enjoy covering in butcher paper.  They claim that its sole purpose is for sanitary reasons, but I’m not fooled- I know that it’s really to make the patients feel even more self-conscious than they already do.

            Tapping my foot idly against the side of the table, I looked around.  There were odd, beeping machines in varying degrees of lethality.  It smelled strongly of disinfectant- it was one of those hospital sorts of smells that was so strong you could taste it.  It was as though Mr. Clean had been getting lectured in the sterile white room about being pre-diabetic before I arrived.  It was very distracting.  There was a chalkboard and a tiny desk somewhere to my left.  The desk was covered in excellent reading material such as ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ and “I Can Do it Myself!”  Fantastic.

            Some fifteen minutes later, two people came into the office, startling my mother and I out of our thoughtful reveries.  There was a man and a woman ; the woman, my doctor, was in a white lab coat and the man wore a burgundy shirt and navy blue tie.  He was of some sort of Middle Eastern descent and was abnormally tall.  He introduced himself as ‘Mo’, a medical student shadowing one of the experienced doctors, and said nothing more throughout the hour-long appointment.

            The doctor- Dr. Gassner was her name- had a distinctly eccentric look about her.  Her hair, dirty blonde in colour and extremely frizzy, fought valiantly with the cheap plastic clip that restrained it.  The bright blue hue of her eyes paired with their curiously round shape gave her a permanent look of surprise.  She sat down at her computer and without further adieu launched into a series of rapid-fire questions directed at my mother and explanations of diseases with ridiculously long names.

            Without warning, she fell silent.  Evidently, she had asked me a question, but I had stopped listening after the nineteenth medical term I could neither understand nor pronounce.  I instead was wondering vaguely why exactly patient rooms always had to be white and colder than Greenland, and why Mo was so tall.  I asked her to repeat the question and was forcibly reminded of some sick, twisted game show.

            “What sort of things do you eat?” Dr. Gassner asked again.

            “Uhm…Well, I eat a lot of things,” I told her, “I don’t eat the same thing every day.  Well, I try not to, anyway.”

            She sighed, as though trying to calm herself.  “What did you have for lunch today?” she rephrased.

            “Uhm…half a sandwich…apples…and a 100 calorie bag of Cheetos…”  She pursed her lips and ‘tutted’ at me.  I saw a lecture in my near future and tried to head it off at the pass.

            “Well, it was one of those 100 calorie bags,” I said halfheartedly.

            “It still has a lot of fat,” she said, gritting her teeth as though the thought of Cheetos disappointed her greatly.  I sniffed, beginning to get annoyed.  She turned on my mother.

            “You should eliminate junk food entirely, you know,” she told my mother stiffly.  My mother laughed.

            “I can’t.  She’ll just buy it at school.”

            “Oh, I’m sure that you can.  I mean, you are her mother aren’t you?”

            I bristled, and so did my mother.  Dr. Gassner refused to look at me, so I focused on Mo, glaring at him like me very life depended on it.  Mo, almost making up for what my psychotic doctor lacked, had the decency to look embarrassed at her blatant jab at my mother’s parenting skills.  She continued.

            “You know, when the pilgrims came over here, they didn’t have Cheetoes or Pepsi or Coke.  They didn’t have pizza or Gatorade,” she said as though speaking to a three-year-old who was hard of hearing.

            “They didn’t have electricity, either,” I pointed out, “Or farming equipment.”

            She chose not to dignify this with a response and continued.  Unfortunately, I didn’t hear a word of it.  Until, that is, I heard ‘America’ get dragged into the ring.  Rarely does this ever occur with good intentions for the latter, so I decided to listen in, as I am rather fond of our country.  I’m just weird like that.  Listening, however, was not one of my better ideas.           

            “…Yes, Americans just don’t know how to eat properly,” the American citizen was saying airily, “When I go to visit relatives in Norway, they always have lovely, healthy things there like sprouts and tofu on a warm bun.”  Her face lit up, like this was the most fabulous thing she could think of to eat.  I cocked an eyebrow at her.

            “Sounds appetizing,” I said dryly.

            “Oh, it is.  But you’d never find anything like that here in America.”

            “Healthy food is extremely labor-intensive,” I told her, idly drumming my fingers on the butcher paper while trying to be as loud and irritating as possible, “Not to mention pretty disgusting.”

            This comment set her off on a ten minute spiel on just how lazy Americans are.  I suggested that perhaps they were just busy, making a living and contributing to making ours the most productive country in the world and what not, but she had a response to this as well.

            “Yes, Americans are far too busy.  Always going, going, going- never slowing down to stop and smell the roses.” She paused.

            I took this opportunity to stop and smell the roses of amusement at the fact that in the same breath she had informed my mother and I that Americans were both too lazy and too busy.

            “…And the maternity leave laws, which Europe had years ago,” she was saying emphatically.  How or why maternity leave laws, European or otherwise, came up is still a mystery to me.  There was a bit more pointless conversation, then she asked me to lay down.  I blinked at her a few times then lay down on the table, the paper crunching noisily beneath me.  Without further adieu, she plowed the index, middle, and ring fingers of both hands just under my ribs.

            “Ow!” I said, slapping her hands away (purely a reflex) and throwing her a dirty look (not quite as much of a reflex).

            “Oh…did that hurt?” she asked with a tone and expression which suggested that my very existence was riding on my answer.

            “Well, duh.  You poked me really hard,” I said, exhaling and sitting up.  She gave a very forced smile.

            “You have a very strong personality,” she said though gritted teeth.

            “Thanks.  You know, it’s funny.  Would you believe that I get that a lot?”

            For what seemed like hours, the only sounds in the little white room were machines beeping benignly and Mo clearing his throat.  I think he had a cold.  Poor guy.

            “You may get dressed now,” she said finally.  Without so much as a ‘thanks for coming’, she breezed out of the room with Mo shuffling awkwardly in her wake.

            “Gee, thanks,” I told the closed door.  I looked at my mom, who shook her head and sighed.  As we walked to the car, I finally spoke.

            “What was that?”

            “I don’t know, Catie,” she said, torn between amusement and annoyance, “I don’t know…”

            “Am I pre-diabetic?”   

            “No clue.”

            “Fantastic.  Let’s go to McDonalds and have a cheeseburger and fries in Dr. Gassner’s honour.”

            “Sounds good.”

            Thus we drove away with dreams of retaliatory French fries in our hearts.

 

Author's Note

Rate, review, and enjoy. If you have had any medical encounters like this one, I am terribly sorry.

Reviews

[Cassya77]

Oh my! This is so good i love it! funny, witty, intelligent AND TRUE! I bow to you in you awsomeness of your writing! i do really enjoy it! (just in case you couldn't tell I'm a teenager) :) I love it!