Maintenance

  

        With a lifetime of head-to-toe freckles, I’ve given little thought to any new spots that arrived.
Age spots? Nope, must be another freckle.

          So what if every time I turned my back on my daughter in a bathing suit she would blanch and ask when I last had a check-up. My primary care doctor checked me regularly. It wasn’t until a relative stranger in a pool last year asked me the same question that I decided perhaps some action was in order.

          I now have a dermatologist, a friendly lady who zipped right past all the dark islands scattered across my back and found a small innocuous white bump that ultimately was biopsied and then carved out.

          Yesterday I went for my six-month check up. I arrived a bit early, so I settled into the waiting room and read all about celebrities I’d never heard of who were divorcing and/or entering into new liaisons with other celebrities I’d never heard of.

          My name was called and I was ushered not into an exam room, but another waiting room, a sort of medical limbo. If the intent was to fool me into thinking I was progressing through the office system, it wasn’t working.

          I finally achieved an actual exam room where a nurse updated my records and gave me a thin cotton garment. These are not robes, or gowns, as medical people optimistically call them - they’re sleeveless objects with the thickness of one of your better brands of facial tissue. And mine, with one normal tie at the neck and a second one-inch stub to tie to it, had been assembled by someone with a dark sense of humor.

The high yesterday was 26 degrees and evidence of that was seeping into the room.  I sat there, waiting, clutching my scrap of cloth, my feet and everything else getting colder and colder by the minute and told myself, “the doctor is coming. . .now. . . . No, the doctor is coming.. . . now.”

She finally did arrive and everything checked out fine.

But now I’ve had a taste of my dog’s life after I close the door.