Uninsured Appointment
Thom’s
cousin, a large blue-faced man with a clubbed foot, worked for a
medical corporation whose office building was constructed to resemble
the cube at Astor Place. Like La Alamo the building spun on its corner.
It was called The Oculogyric and was surrounded by paved space like the
oceans surrounding South America. Its parking lot rose and fell in
waves, making it difficult to park. The building spun relentlessly. But
let’s talk about Thom if I can ask for that. Your eyes are almost
dilated, good. Thom had a brother and I’m going to ask you to
care about this. Perhaps another nurse can find the veins in your hand?
If Thom and the brother took walks when they needed to clear the
cobwebs, this might call to mind my relation to them both, as well as
to the flashes in your macula. One year I worked for Thom’s
brother in the rival medical corporation they said they had started,
but which in fact was not a medical corporation at all, but a cleverly
dammed stream. Whole years passed between the sticks and rocks used to
make that dam, and everybody knows that years must pass, and always
quickly in the office of a retinal specialist. My own doctor, a
gentleman who treats only doctors when he isn’t deconstructing
stethoscopes, and who has reversed his name several times, changing it
from Dr. Spot to Dr. Tops, then back to Spot, then back to Tops, says
that it’s not unusual for big changes to occur in the eye, or
even the heart, without any real notice on the part of the patient,
until one day everything is noticed, but not as well. What is noticed
is that things are not noticed. Everything is the same to one’s
eyes, while downstairs, the heart or liver has taken fancy to becoming
irregular and no one can see this. If you don’t have the right
prescription, you may find yourself wearing two pairs of glasses at
once, one for the sun, one for things no longer worthy of attention. At
the same time, one may require a second pace-maker and a new liver,
neither of which, unless made of origami, are easy to locate beyond
South America.
Uninsured Appointment 2
I was
called back into a room and asked to sit in the patient chair.
“Would you like the footrest down?” Carroll asked while
simultaneously swinging it down and bashing my ankles. She asked me
questions about my symptoms and I answered as honestly as possible.
Then she gave me a small chart with big and small letters, asking me to
cover one eye with a masquerade mask that had only one eye hole. She
did something to the mask and made pinholes appear all over, then asked
me to look through a pinhole to see if it helped. I moved the mask,
searching for a good pinhole, but it wasn’t helping. Carroll put
some bright yellow numbing drops in my eyes and said, “I’m
just going to check your pressure!” I put my chin in the stirrup
and pressed my forehead against the strap as she swung around a machine
with a fluorescent blue finger, and by what I could tell, proceeded to
poke me in the eye. I guess my pressure was good, because then she put
three different dilating drops in my eye and led me to the dilating
waiting area, where I noticed that everyone else was old. I tried to
avoid eye contact with the plump lady across from me, whose cataracts
kept staring back. Some 30 minutes later, another woman led me to a
different, but identical exam room. “Want the footrest
down?” she asked. “No,” I said before she could cross
the room. She took my glasses, and in the door walked a blob in a white
coat, who shook my hand and made pleasantries while seated on a stool.
“Lets make you comfortable,” he said, leaning over to put
down the footrest. “Thanks,” I said. Only the nurse and I
knew the truth. I was then faceplanted into another contraption and
made to look all over. “I think you have MEWDS,” the doctor
said. “Could be from a viral infection. I am going to have one of
my colleagues take a look.” Off to a another test room wearing
the same sort of headgear out of Brazil. A girl took countless photos
of my eyeballs, the flash about a half inch from my eyes, and then they
wanted to inject me with some orange ink and photo my eyes again, but
she couldn’t find a vein. She put a tourniquet on both arms and
wrists. “Where’s Sue?” she said. “Sue is good
with tiny veins!” Sometime during all this the doctor came in
again. “You’re still here?” he asked. He injected me
and took a panoramic photo of my eyeball. It was gross. “You have
some slight mottling; do you know what that is, like a horse?”
After another hour in the geriatric waiting room, I was taken to a new
doctor. This time I did not fight the footrest. He told me to focus on
the blinking light, which he called Star Wars. My left eye saw a laser
light show as the doctor explained that not everything can be
explained. Then the nurse came in with a $1,500 bill, saying I was free
to go.