Tag Archives: life

The Funny Side of Malfunctioning

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So if I’m going to take you on a journey with me into my brave new health world, let’s start with how I entered it. Which is, if I do say so myself, a very funny story.

I went to Mexico with the Wayfaring Writers. One of the attendees was a retired MD whose granddaughter had given her the flu just before she left, so she was getting antibiotics from a local clinic.

In Mexico, if you want antibiotics, you go to the pharmacy, see the doctor attached to it in an office next door, pay something around $5, and get a diagnosis. Watching my friend do this, I kept thinking how nice it would be to take a little souvenir home: cheap Cefalaxin. I’m one of the lucky ones allergic to penicillin. Getting cheap C to take back sounded good, but there was one problem.

I was healthy as a horse.

My MD friend smiled at me. “You’d have to lie. The easiest lie is to say you have a UTI. Those symptoms are easy to describe.”

“Are you enabling me?” I laughed.

She shrugged, and smiled again, and said nothing.

So two days later, having wrestled my moral concerns into submission, I went to a pharmacy, and saw a doctor. I paid him $3 and began describing the symptoms I did not have.

He kept staring at me. He knows I’m lying! Hot guilt suffused my face.

He asked, did I have a fever? Did I have a backache? Was I short of breath?

These are not UTI symptoms.

When I answered in the negative for all these, he said, through the Spanglish sign language combined with his phone’s Google Translator, that he was going to take my blood pressure. He used an electronic arm cuff, read the meter, and his eyebrows shot into his hairline.

He got out a sphagnometer (the manual cuff that requires a stethoscope) and took it again. Then he wrote something on a pad, and said, “You’re getting an EKG.”

Uhhhh, okay……

Twenty minutes and $15 later, I was naked on a bed while  a very handsome man ran his hands over my breasts. I swear to you, in that moment, the ONLY thing I could think was, I really should have been more specific about my fantasies for this trip.

I told the doc on our trip about my adventure, and she said likely the doctor who sent me for the EKG was reacting to something I was doing without knowing it: panting, perhaps, short of breath; or flushed because of the exertion of the heat and the heart not liking each other in a country full of salt and alcohol. Both of which were flowing through my veins at that point quite freely.

Two hours later, I was back in the kind doctor’s office with an envelope, which he took, studied, pursed his lips. Then he reached for his phone.

You have upper left blocked.

Dude, I need a noun. But Google was not yet up to providing “ascending aortic aneurysm.” That would come two months later, when I was hooked back into the American system struggling to get appointments.

I think fondly of Mexico these days, and that souvenir envelope containing the EKG that may well have saved my life (and a box of Cefalaxin). As anyone with an aneurysm can tell you, the most important thing about having one is knowing that you do.

So I’m on an interesting journey and will tell you more later, but all hail that kind doctor who looked, really looked, at me, and saw through me straight to my heart in the best possible way.

That Margarita, Though

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Bad days that follow good times feel somehow worse, as though reality wishes to remind you that you’re not on holiday anymore, you have responsibilities and the occasional wild card, so here’s one to remember that with.

I left my last aunt’s house at 6:30 am on Sunday. Four days of visiting relatives, attending conferences, making strategy, and running around with childhood friends from my old neighborhood would culminate in getting to my parents’ house in time to see my sister, who was there helping them get their wills finalized.

This was a big deal, the moment when “what happens if” became a certain plan involving who had what decisions to make and who would come live with them and inherit the house, all the things. My sister and I had agreed an amiable plan, and we really wanted to celebrate it with Sunday fun before they went to the lawyer’s office Monday.

My tire blew at 9:30. There was a rest area right there and off I wobbled–knowing what that smell, that sound, and that pull to the right meant. But hey, I had Triple A, hurray hurray!

Yeah, right.

Four hours later the tow truck took me five miles on their dime and another three on mine. Every time I called to check progress, they told me the tow truck would be there within 45 minutes. A nice truck driver offered to help me, but the Prius had no spare. A couple of people asked if they could do anything, but the tire store open on Sunday was behind us, northbound, and everyone at the rest area was going south. So Triple A got a scathing review, and I got a new tire at 3:30 pm.

Which meant the day with my sister was lost. I should have been there at 1, but still had three hours of driving. After a few phone calls (hands-free, of course) we agreed I would shop up Monday after the wills and we’d all grab lunch before I had to conduct business in Knoxville for my day job.

So I drove another couple of hours until the emotional and physical exhaustion of a packed week of extroverting coupled with the anger of realizing Triple A was a scam and I’d been took suggested now would be a good time to pull over.

I pulled off in some little town called London, Kentucky, and found a hotel with a pool. By then I was starving, and 600 feet straight down the road was this little shack of a restaurant labeled “Mexican Grille”

Whatever. I stashed my stuff in the room and walked to the place, decorated like every other Mexican foodery in America. I ordered a veggie quesadilla and the house margarita.

A minute later the waitress brought me a party in a swimming pool. I’ve seen hotel bathtubs smaller than that thing. I stared at the sparkler, which seemed to be singing something to the effect of “THE SUN’LL COME OUUUUUUT TOMORRRRROWWWW” while simultaneously promising immediate delights.

It had five pieces of fruit, three pieces of candy, and a rubber duck hanging off its rim in addition to the sparkler. Forget salted rim; there was no rim showing beneath that stuff.

The waitress openly laughed at my face, and then she patted me on the shoulder and left.

I don’t think I’ll ever know if she read my face and added a few things, or if that’s the way the margarita sparkles in London, Kentucky, in this tiny little shack of a restaurant by the side of the road in this deserted small Appalachian town.

It was the next day, talking to Jack (hands-free!) as I drove down to Knoxville that he pointed out where I had been: THAT London, where the guy had shot up the highway before disappearing. Well, maybe that explained why the place was so empty and the hotel and the restaurant were so friendly and kind. They were recovering from a very bad week as well.

The sparkler told the truth: in all the hard times and strange circumstances, we still have Light to guide us, some fun to have, a few delightful surprises to lift our spirits in bad times, and always, the friends and family who undergird our lives. Thank God for London, for sweet waitresses who makes amazing margaritas, and for sparklers.