Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree of Freedom .
I hate it when a doctor’s nervous. I can tell. They get that sudden oh-I-must-keep-it-cool-and-not-say-anything-to-worry-the-patient-unnecessarily tone of voice and that shift in their eyes and the little twitches in their expressions that set my intuitive antennae on maximum reception mode. And unlike when my daughter’s doctor told me last December, “Let me worry for you,” this physician made no such offer.
So now begins the hell called waiting. There is no worse torment for me because my mind goes into overtime with every possible sabotaging thought.
With a blood test down and a prescription in hand and another test or two to go and already scheduled, I’m just focusing on getting through each moment. But that starts the minute I walk into the doc’s office in Bluewater today, whereupon he immediately tells me he’s about to relocate 20 miles away in Freeport because of the things that are soon to be going on out there and will that be a problem? For once, I’m not so concerned with the future. I just want to be seen by a doctor. Now.
But his receptionist is a sweetheart, and his nurse is super and we talk about how she made more money working as a secretary on the Air Force Base in 1997 than she does as a nurse but how she loves getting up in the morning and going to work now and I thought, yes, that’s how it should be. How can I get back to there? Or is it somewhere else now?
She took my height and weight and blood pressure, and I find to my pleasant surprise that my scales at home are 1 to 2 pounds too heavy, and that means I’ve lost between 17 and 18 pounds now from where I started, and I’m pleased with the visible progress and the proof in the weight blank on my medical chart.
I spent too much time in the waiting room, looking at the Smithsonian and a story on Brazilian Indians where the women may or may not be the tribe chiefs. Hard to tell because modern “society” hasn’t infiltrated them yet, but it’s just a matter of time until their way of life is destroyed.
Then I opened up a men’s health magazine to an article on long-distance relationships and how they can work as long as there’s “phone sex and homemade pornography” involved and that long-distance lovers write each other twice as many love notes as a couple in the same town and the break-up rate’s no greater than with the couple next door.
Twice as many? The article claimed it was a scientific fact, but I have my doubts. During my long-distance relationship years with my ex, he sent me only one letter and in hindsight, I probably grumbled about all the bazillion letters I sent him with nothing back until he sent an obligatory love letter than sorta read like an obligatory love letter. He never spent much time composing the love letters I’d longed for until after I’d filed for divorce.
Then I flipped the page and found an advice column. Did you know women generally save the sex for the third date? Anything before that and “society” says she’s a slut. I was just moving on to the survey about whether men prefer women with breast enhancements when the nurse called me back. Good thing, too, because after reading what Lee, age 40, says about what women should do for his pleasure, well, my blood pressure was starting to spike a bit over this!
I’m going to have to read more of these men’s magazines….
Work to do tonight, I tell myself. Get the beautifully told Hidden Passages reformatted one last time and my website updated some more and work on revising Dark Revelations a bit and, well, first I’m calling Vicki because I need someone I can talk to about this and I’m so grateful for friends like her.
But first, on the way home, I stop to get a prescription filled ASAP. While I’m there, I pick up a bouquet of coral-pink and cream roses for myself and a bag of Mint Milano cookies.
They make me feel better.
Which is good, because this time I think the worrying’s something I’m going to have to do for myself.
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