Here’s What Happened ... Here’s What Didn’t

Here’s what actually happened

She was trembling and a little flushed when she walked into the examining room to take my blood pressure and prep me for the doctor. “I haven’t done this in a while,” she said, pumping up the blood pressure cuff, nervously eyeing a hypodermic needle on a stainless steel tray. “Lately I’ve mostly been working in the back reviewing medical charts.” I twitched a little, actually at a loss for words. This was when I (rather unwisely) remembered how a good joke can sometimes put a person at ease. “Don’t worry,” I said, smirking to force feed the humor. “I’m a doctor. I’ll tell you if you do it wrong.”

The problem was that this turned out not to be so funny - mostly because she didn’t get the joke. In fact she didn’t get it so much that when she let the air out of the blood pressure bag she whispered, “You have excellent blood pressure, doctor.”

By the time I got my mouth opened to try to fix the problem, she was already on her way out the door looking to get away from me as fast as she could, mumbling “Dr. Weis will be right in to see you, Dr. Taddei,” and then closing the door behind her.

And things only got worse when Dr. Weiss showed up. “Hello there,” he said, shaking my hand, “I hear you’re a physician ...”

Now there are two things you can do in a situation like this. You can run out of the room and never go back there again, or you can quickly correct the lie, endure the condescending looks of a man who already feels superior to you because he actually is a doctor (and you’re not) and then you can run out of the room and never go back there again.

Actually, in the moment before I took the second option, I also thought of a third option. It was something that crossed my mind for the two seconds that it took me to come to my senses. Maybe I could just play along. Maybe I could avoid the embarrassment and just tell him that I was a doctor. Other people lived out their fantasies all the time, didn’t they? Other people realized that the time they had left to live was getting shorter and shorter and they escaped by pretending they could start all over again. Why couldn’t I? In fact, who knew where this might lead . . .

Here’s what didn’t happen

“Hello there,” he says, shaking my hand. “I hear you’re a physician.”

“Why yes, I am.” I say. “But I don’t like to make too big of a deal out of it.”

“I know what you mean,” he replies with that look of understanding shared only among those of us who have seen the inside of a human body. “So what can I do for you today, doctor?”

“First of all call me Tony.”

He glances at my chart and then looks up at me with a knowing grin.

“Well, Tony. Judging by this, I think you probably already know what I can do for you.”

“I do? I mean, yes, I do . . . It’s what I think it is . . . Am I right?”

“Yes you are. So, I’m guessing you just need me to write the script . . .”

“Yeah, that’s it. I’m just trying to avoid any ethical issues.”

“No problem. I’m always happy to help a fellow practitioner.”

He writes out the script and hands it to me. He then pauses for a moment before he decides to tell me that a group of the doctors in his practice are going out for drinks after work. “We always like to get to know other professionals in the area. Would you like to join us?”

My brain does one of those little flips, that tickling quick high you get in those moments where you realize you are free to follow any lie, any deception, any poor choice or illegal activity without getting caught and with the potential for personal gain or a life-changing series of events - whether it be sex with a woman who doesn’t know that you have a girlfriend, the theft of a fat wallet you see lying next to a vacant car as you happen by in a parking lot, or the chance to have drinks with a group of men and women who have given their life to medical science because you lied and told them that you have too.

“I’d love to,” I say, looking directly into Dr. Weiss’s eyes. “Where and what time should we meet?”

I hurry home and Google medical specialties, deciding on pediatrics because I have always liked children and because having raised three of my own and spent hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in pediatricians’ offices I feel I both have a head start on this choice of specialties as well as a right to get some return on my money. I read up on pediatrics for the next three hours, choose Johns Hopkins as my medical school, memorize some rare childhood diseases (See: Krabbe disease, Eisenmenger Syndrome, Osteogenesis Imperfecta . . .) and then I go out to find a medical supply store where I can buy some tongue depressors with cartoon characters on them which I put in my shirt pocket before joining Dr. Weiss and his colleagues for a drink.

Our drinks go better than you might expect and all the doctors in the practice are very impressed with both my education and my compassion for children as well as with my shyness when it comes to talking about my work which I modestly explain is not my style and which only gets them to respect me more. Their only regret, they tell me, is that they can’t hire me since they run a practice that specializes in gastrointestinal problems. I assure them I’m happy where I am and then I rush home, having now decided to apply to an online premed program.

Time seems to speed up now as I finish my premed studies long distance at the University of Bucharest and then apply to a medical school in the Bahamas which I attend by taking a leave of absence from my current job. My wife and children are incredibly supportive and - when I come back from doing my residency at a small hospital in the Philippines (which certifies me to treat patients in the US) – they are so happy that “daddy is doctor” that they forget all about the fact that I’ve deserted them for almost four years. The problem is that by then I’ve already met and married a 20 year old Pilipino girl and when my wife finds out she files for divorce, taking me for half the earnings of my future medical practice.

I see it as just the price one has to pay for a career in medicine.

Anyway, years go by and I am practicing pediatrics in a small office I run with a former CIA Black Op (who also did his pediatric residency in the Philippines and with whom I bonded after I found out that he too felt compelled to change his life, although for different reasons than me which he would have liked to talk about except that if he did he would have had to kill me and bury my body at sea) when, oddly enough, Dr. Weiss walks into my examining room with his eight year old daughter, Becky.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Dr. Taddei,” says Dr. Weiss with a genuine grin of delight.

For a moment, I think of once again reminding him to ‘call me Tony,’ but then I decide that I’d rather not, given that I now actually am a doctor.

“It’s been quite a few years. My partners and I wondered what happened to you.”

“Well I keep a low profile. My work treating sick children is satisfaction enough.”

It’s then that Dr. Weiss introduces me to his daughter. “Dr. Taddei, this is Becky. Becky, say hi to Dr. Taddei.”

She shyly says hello and her father prompts her again. “Tell Dr. Taddei what you want to be when you grow up.”

Without taking her eyes off her father, Becky says, “I want to be a doctor like you.”

“Well Dr. Taddei is also a doctor. Maybe you’d like to take care of children like he does.”

“Maybe,” she mumbles.

“That would be wonderful,” I say. “There are lots of children who would love to have you as their doctor when you grow up.”

Dr. Weiss smiles at me with what I can only see as wistful, professional pride. Here we are, just a couple of men of science, passing the torch to the next generation.

“Yeah,” Becky blurts out. “But my daddy doesn’t want to be a doctor, anymore. He complains to my mommy all the time. He says that, if he could, he’d just walk away . . . He eve says that sometimes when he’s taking care of sick people, he’s really thinking about what would happen to him if he just left them in the examining room to go off and become a writer.”

_______

“Everything is created twice, first in the mind of the creator and then in reality.” Steven Covey

The Counter Man

I love the way her head falls when she has been drinking vodka and the paperback she imagines she is reading falls from her hand and the ash from her cigarette flakes down onto the inside of her boozy tank top just under her naked cleavage, burning a tiny lace of holes in a place not too far from her heart. I love that she has sunk this low into the bottle and that I am in there with her. I love that her family has abandoned her – her precious grown children who cannot fathom the way she has thrown away her life; her two ex husbands, the first a good man with common sense, too good and with too much sense for the tragedy that is her, and the second a prick who should, if there is a God, die in misery. I love that I am all that is left for her – because, let’s face it, I am no prize myself, just a sober drunk and a miserable bottom feeder who began big but was laid low and is now barely hanging on to a hourly job with no guarantees that any of this will last without him fucking it up. I love that I am just one step far enough behind her to be able to make sure she does not catch fire and burn up like a gin-soaked rag. I love that her life has taken these brutal and cursed turns, brought upon her by her fate alone. I love it because she needs me. God help me, I love it because I am the only one left who still loves her.

She was beautiful – I don’t want you to ever forget that. Everyone else has. But don’t you forget it, you judgmental bastards walking by her outside the strip mall, seeing her sitting on the ground against the flowering bushes, her mascara streaked head lolling back into a crown of honeysuckle (Yes, I know you’ve seen her). If I lifted her today, right now, from the sidewalk, took her home and washed her face and hair, gave her coffee and dried her inside and out, you might just see enough of what I mean to get the point. I’ve seen pictures of her at 19 with a baby in her arms and a fire backlighting her on Christmas Eve, and no Madonna and Child that Raphael could have painted would have ever filled in the frame the way she did. Where she started and how she started is a long, long way from where she has landed now.

She told me her story during those three weeks we worked together on the graveyard shift at the deli counter of the 24/7 Safeway. By the time I met her she had legs like soda straws and her blouse and apron swam on her, but she was wide awake during the night and could stay sober enough not to take off her fingers with the slicer, so I let her work with me and by the end, by the time they fired her, I had heard it all and gotten deep, deep inside her where I am to this day. There was very little left that I did not know about her after those three weeks, even if I didn’t care to know it, and to say that I started to love her for her past, her present and even (or mostly) for her lack of any real future, is to say that I had been waiting a long, long time for her or someone like her to show up and surround me with her need.

The story she told me is not your story. Then again, her story is not as far from yours as you might want to think. A tweak in fate here, a tiny twist in your genetic code there, and you’d be the one with the high-strung temperament chasing you all the way from a husband working his way up as a union mechanic, from two sweetheart daughters who you kept washed and ribboned and your Saturday job at the Cut and Curl, to that night when your inability to forgive your parents, your husband or yourself finally overcame you in shifting tectonics of anxiety and you drank and drank and drank until you started to pound yourself in the face with your own fists again and again - your wailing children and unshaven husband watching as the police and EMS technicians carried you through the drizzling night into the yawn of an idling ambulance. Don’t forget that it’s only an accident of family history and the rules of chance that kept you from marrying again after your first husband divorced you and you lost your children. And it’s simply you planning and god not laughing at your plans that helped you avoid a second husband who gave you a job in his insurance company where you and he drank away the cash flow and he beat you and then left you alone in an empty, over-mortgaged house after he took every table, plate and chair (not to mention the car, the motorcycle and the barbecue grill) to go set up house with a much younger drunk than you. When you see her with me and I’ve got her under her arms, rolling her out of some bar in which I found her, remember that, but for the grace of your birth, it’s you whose shoulders are caving into my chest, whose short, shambling hair is plastered by the sweat of other drunks against the protruding bones of your eye sockets as I lower you into my car. It’s merely the cosmic dust of happenstance that keeps you out of a bed with me in my tenement apartment, sleeping off your liquor at night.

The world is full of us, of you and me. And any of us could be her. Although, I have to admit that, in the end, she is who she is – there’s no getting around that. I have taken her and sat her skinny ass down in one of those smoke-stained retro chairs that we set up in stale church halls where the drunks and abusers and reformed addicts sit and confess our sins and inject each other with the power to go on another day without having to shoot ourselves with a needle or needle ourselves with temptation. And she will bounce from that meeting into the sunlight or the moonlight, promising me the sun and the moon, and when I kiss her goodbye and go off to the shift I have to work to keep us in clean clothes and edible food she will deceive me and find a place to quietly sit and pretend to read her cheap paperback (a final tilt at civilization) and smoke her cigarettes down to the filters and drink her way into another life – a life where she has grandchildren who come running into her arms when she calls, and a handsome, graying husband trimming the grass of a big backyard and where she dreams she is free to enjoy the fruits of all the clean and sober work she has done.

You see, a woman has to dream and someone has to love her for it and that someone is me. Why, you ask - because no matter what you think, there is a person inside that woman. And who’s to say that her life and the way she lives and the way that she will die is not what God intended for her or any of us all along. I had another life planned but the righteousness I had about that life was beaten out of me a long time ago, about the time I drank away a thriving business I built with my talents for telling a story and making a good buck, about the time I had to let go of what it was I though God had planned for all of us righteous and arrogant fools. So I see it differently now.

I see a world where the drunks will inherit the earth. I flip it all on its head - the way fate flipped her on her head and me on mind - as I tend to my flock of one. In the place that she and I live it is you with the estates and the two and three cars garages and the jobs so big you can barely contain your heads inside them; you who the world looks down on as we addicts and losers cluck our tongues and shake our heads at the edges of your driveways and gated communities. You are the ones who stoop in shame as you overspend on your children’s college educations and your summer houses. It is you who God admonishes when you use others as an excuse for your inability to be as down low and wasted and close to the edge as we are. In this world God giggles as he blesses the dammed and the down-trodden and he leaves the rest of you to beg for his forgiveness. I dare you to tell me that this might not just be the way God wanted us to see the world from the moment he hung his only son on a cross between a beggar and a thief.

So step up now and give me your order. We’re all in this together – whether it’s you snoring, drunk and peaceful, in the bed next to me when I go home tonight or whether it is she – there is no difference or distance between us. A pound of food that will feed you is a pound of food that will feed all of us. And I love the way your face twinkles just a little when you take the package from my hands as much as I love the way she will someday die in my arms, human and forgiven.

Despicable Acts and Desperate Measures

“(AP) – July 16, 2010 - JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri abortion clinics will face new mandates to offer women ultrasound images and heartbeats of their fetuses as a result of legislation allowed to become law Wednesday by Gov. Jay Nixon . . . The new law will require consultation in person instead of over the phone and mandate that women receive a description of the "anatomical and physiological characteristics of the unborn child."

From the Desk of . . .

Senator Alvin Blackmore

Republican - Missouri

Re: Budget Saving Measures

I am tickled pink to report the phenomenal success of the right-to-life law that has recently been passed in my home district of Jefferson City, Missouri. In fact, so many poor, destitute and single pregnant women in Jefferson City have now surprisingly chosen to have their babies rather than be made to listen to the heartbeats and a detailed description of their unborn fetuses (along with a gruesome account of the termination procedure which local officials “recommend” that doctors whisper in the expectant woman’s ear) that it has actually given me cause to think of how we might use this same strategy to shrink the enormous budget deficit brought on by our godless democratic colleagues as they break faith with the American people by spending government money to care for the sick and feed and house the poor even as hard-working Republican citizens go to church and pay our salaries.

I say this - if forcing a socially deprived, desperate woman to listen to a heartbeat or the description of an ultrasound will cause her to keep her baby, imagine how we might use this same psychology to cut billions of hard-earned dollars from our federal deficit.

To wit, I propose that we immediately consider the following legislation:

The Blackmore Expired Food Amendment – This amendment to the food stamp program would make it mandatory that anyone applying for food stamps first starve their children and/or themselves for a period of two weeks before being allowed to register for the program. After that, they would be allowed to apply for a one month trial period upon which they would receive an allotment of food stamps that could only be used to buy foods that have passed their expiration date (preferably eggs, milk and cheeses that are more than three months old). While this measure may seem harsh, only the truly destitute and hungry will likely stay with the program long enough to make them eligible for the “Food Stamp Elite Access Program,” entitling them to pay 80 cents for one dollar’s worth of food stamps and saving the government hundreds of billions in this program alone.

The Blackmore Medieval Medicine Measure – Millions of illegal aliens, drug addicts and just plain lazy unemployed individuals are sucking money from federal health programs by entering government funded hospitals and treatment facilities simply because they won’t pull themselves together or because they insist on working long hours in poor conditions at sub-minimum wage jobs. Imagine the surprise of these folks when they find out that – in order to receive federal health care – they will have to allow doctors to examine and treat them using techniques that date back to the 15th and 16th century. For instance, if a drug addict were to apply for government sponsored rehab - under this new federal program he would be confined to a rat infested cell with the criminally insane where a priest cloaked in a black hood would perform an exorcism on him while forcing hot wax down his throat. Or let’s say an undocumented alien were to walk into a government clinic with a badly mangled arm caused by operating heavy machinery in an illegal sweatshop; he or she would be anesthetized by placing a leather helmet on his head and then being hit repeatedly with a wooden mallet prior to having the arm amputated with a rusty sickle. While this bill may further the accusations that we Republicans are cruel and heartless, we will not, nor should we deny care to anyone truly in need. If those in need don’t want to have leeches placed on them to treat their asthma that’s simply their choice (and the federal government’s gain).

The Blackmore Boondoggle Bill – Who among us likes to work? Not me, that’s for sure. Well if this psychology motivates all of us why not use it on those who are seeking federal unemployment benefits. You want to collect an unemployment check? No problem. We’ll give it to you and you won’t even need to qualify or answer a single question. All you have to do to get the money is agree to take a trip at the government’s expense to a remote, undisclosed Island in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Siberia. Your unemployment checks will be forwarded to a PO office box in Moscow and you can pick them up anytime you feel you’ve taken enough from other Americans who have to work for a living. Once again, lest we Republicans be thought of as heartless, the American people will be encouraged to think of this as a working vacation where all they need to do to earn their money is to relax on sheets of black ice surrounded by hungry polar bears. Remember we are compassionate conservatives and it’s the least we can do for those who are stressed out by not being able to find a job, not to mention what this will do for currently employed American’s who will have their hours cut and have to work much less as unemployment rolls drop by 85% in the first year alone.

The Blackmore ‘Share’ Housing Act – Remember the days when your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and even a boarder or two lived with you and your family in your tenement apartment? Well, neither do I, but I’m sure that millions of Americans do fondly remember these quaint depression era stories and are probably longing for the good old days. This act would bring them back while also allowing us to continue helping our failing banks and domestic car companies with bailout money that would preserve executive salaries. We are not asking people to come to us to seek housing, but if they have to why not further the concept of America as a melting pot and allow people of all races, creeds and social backgrounds to live together in single family federal apartment units. No more than four families of six people each would have to share a single unit and we would ensure that the apartments were ethnically integrated without bias toward religion or national origins. For instance, those of Pakistani and Indian origin as well as Christian, Muslim and Jewish families would live together in one big happy cooperative apartment. And in the true spirit of America no one would be turned away from the program or evicted, even if tensions rise (as they sometimes do in big happy families).

Note, at present the above are just for your consideration and are in need of funding for further study. Funding we may be able to acquire as budgets are freed up when the recently passed Blackmore Send Your Child to Work Act takes effect and millions of children saved by our right to life legislation reach their fifth birthday and are forced to go to work in order for their parents to qualify for federal subsidies.

I eagerly await your comments.

Sincerely,

Alvin Blackmore