Seeking Help from a Perfect Stranger
After standard greetings are exchanged, I am handed boxes, a thick stack of them.
Boxes that poke into my psyche, boxes designed to be filled with clues, boxes into which I’m expected to fold myself up and fit, boxes to sum up the workings, quirks, and antecedents of this body I live in.
My brain struggles to process this sudden deluge of curiosity, not least because of the mammoth mental effort required to revert day and month not once, not twice, but at least a dozen times. I thus briefly — and unwittingly — pose as a newborn as my date of birth and the day of my visit are only three days — and some decades — apart.
By the time the nurse calls me in, my fingers are inky and I’m so flustered the blood pressure gauge shoots up and will not settle, earning my index a complimentary finger trap.
“I may be a bit stressed,” I tell the nurse by way of apology.
“That’s OK, your pulse is normal,” she replies.
We sigh in unison. She exits stage right and I go back to the boxes on my lap.
Today, I finally marched myself off to the doctor’s after three years hoping to conjure up wellness. Were it not for some peculiar predicament turning me into a lopsided chipmunk at random and exhaustion levels knocking the very last oomph out of me, I’d probably still be dithering about picking up the phone and making an appointment for fear of incurring yet more bills this household can’t afford.
We do have medical insurance, but since medical care in the US is generally contingent upon being able to afford co-pays, our medical insurance is mostly decorative, a benefit that fails to live up to its name.
The shame of using up resources while not producing any is a powerful antidote to getting well. Pair with the befuddlement bestowed upon most immigrants by the American healthcare system and you end up with people like me, hiding behind a stiff upper lip and mumbling that this, too, shall pass.
Until the only thing that passes is time and your body dreams up some strange symptoms even Dr Google can’t explain away, and the ministrations of benevolent people in scrubs become unavoidable.
Enter Dr C., whose voice is so soothing I feel the grip on my pen loosen a little. His is the effortless delivery of a natural broadcaster, calm, clear, and radiating warmth.
After shining a light into various orifices, listening to my heart, and considering my intermittent chipmunkness, he pulls up a chair and announces he’s not going to do a physical today.
“I’m gonna talk to you instead.”
By the time I’ve managed to squeak out a tiny interjection of questioning acquiescence — a routine doctor’s appointment is an in and out affair where I’m from, and mostly spent in the waiting room — he’s already sitting down in front of me, leaning ever so slightly forward.
In conversation, the room around us fades away, vignette-like, as hesitant words huddle together around my shame to form protective sentences.
Mine is the shame of a professional with a great many dots who’s been unable to connect them anew for the last three years.
Mine is the shame of a stranger in a strange land rattling around like a spare part, unmoored but for marriage.
Mine is the shame of an erstwhile self-supporting adult demoted to the status of dependent child.
Mine is the shame of a human to whom life frequently makes no sense anymore.
For all its many aspects and incarnations, I know this shame of mine to be both ordinary and unoriginal in its insistent omnipotence: it’s the universal shame of a human at risk of getting annihilated by the most basic and unremarkable demands of existence.
Most problematic are my shame’s age and girth — after three years chewing me to shreds, it’s now outsize, a parasite that has grown far bigger than its host. It has volume and heft, width and height, and incontinence issues.
Approach my shame at your peril, it leaks and stains.
Ask the cats, to whom I am but a pair of thumbs growing limp with lack of use!
Ask my brain, slowly pickling itself in self-loathing!
But whatever you do, don’t ask my mother-in-law, to whom I am an antichrist/succubus/golem figure thanks to my national origin, my foreign — rather than American — education, my non-existent bank balance, and who knows what other kind of bizarre bias.
Throughout the conversation, shame remains curled up at my feet, ready to pounce at the mention of its name.
To be on the safe side, I don’t mention it and hope it doesn’t show too much.
Whether the body is wearing down the mind, or the mind is wearing down the body is a riddle that may take some time to unravel, Dr C. tells me.
We share similar suspicions.
One hour and fifty minutes after I checked in at the front desk, I emerge from Dr C.’s office into a gray and moist afternoon. I have matching punctures in both arms, the promise of lab results within twenty-four hours, and a round tabby cat sticker proclaiming “I was brave”. Because it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
Secreted between the pages of my library book are also a referral for someone who deals with occasional chipmunkness in humans, a prescription for something sounding suspiciously like the spawn of a motor vehicle and a printer, and the contact details for two of Dr C.’s personal friends who, like me, are imported.
Wobbly from anxiety and fatigue, I let this unexpected onslaught of kindness carry me home, step by step.
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