01.31.23

I have been putting off going to the doctor. Not because I’m afraid of the doctor, or afraid of what I might hear from the doctor. In large part, it’s because I’ve had issues with insurance in the past, and I just didn’t want to deal with it. But I have made my way to the ripe old age of 26, and I pay for insurance through my job, so I might as well use it. I made an appointment with a supposedly-covered facility in search of a primary care provider.

I arrived to the location about five minutes before my appointment is supposed to be. Security points me toward the fourth floor. I get in the elevator and press the 4 button, and up it went to the fourth floor — but the doors didn’t open, and it went back down. Someone joined me at the third floor, and we rode back to the first together. I pressed 4 again, and repeatedly pressed the “Open Door” button when it reached the fourth floor. It opened this time. I feel I’ve narrowly escaped being trapped in an elevator for the first time since I was stuck in a packed one in the Natural Sciences building in college. That was the week that Kendrick Lamar released DAMN. and we listened to it off someone’s phone while waiting for the campus police to come and be unhelpful.

I walked up to the reception desk on the fourth floor and waited in a line for a few minutes. The woman told me I have to go to the third floor, actually. I had better luck with the elevator this time.

Third floor. I am seven minutes late. Check in. License and insurance card. Paperwork. Date of birth. Blah blah blah. I wait a while.

A male nurse in a sweatshirt, close to my age, retrieves me. I worry about stepping on a scale, because I haven’t weighed myself in 595 days (I would like to thank my sobriety app for that specificity) and I don’t want to start now. I ask him if I can not see it, worried it’ll be a whole thing, and he just puts his hand over the number. I avert my eyes, too, just in case. He brings me into another room and asks me the standard questions. He compliments my perfume and tells me there’s no way I’m only five foot four. I tell him maybe five-five, and we debate it and laugh. He tells me that my blood pressure is excellent. He delivers me back to a waiting area for the doctor. While I’m there, he is bringing cupcakes around to the other nurses. He offers me one but I say no thank you.

The doctor calls my name and tells me to go into an exam room, she’ll be in in a second. When I walk in, there’s muzak-type music playing. I think at first that she is just trying to curate a vibe in her office, but soon discover, upon her entry to the room, that her phone is on speaker as she is on hold with 311.

She is just beginning to ask me more questions when the person on the other end of 311 picks up. I sit there for upwards of ten minutes while she talks to 311 — still on speakerphone — about her NYC property taxes. Both the doctor and the woman she is on the phone with seem unclear on what the actual question is. I now know the doctor’s address and apartment numbers (plural because she owns the unit on the seventh and eighth floor, and they’re connected).

Eventually, after I’ve had plenty of time to take in the various charts on stool texture and sexual wellness in her office, she hangs up the phone. She looks at me and says she can’t believe the direction this country is headed. I’m not sure if she just means in a bureaucratic sense, or something much more sinister, so I just nod. She tells me my blood pressure is excellent. I will develop a superiority complex surrounding my excellent blood pressure before day’s end at this rate.

She continues to ask me questions and type. Mid-keystroke, I watch her open Google Chrome. I worry for a second that she’s about to Google something related to what I’m saying, but instead she goes to a music streaming website and types in “Cyndi Lauper Radio.”

I am sent to a fun woman in candy apple red scrubs for bloodwork. “I never stick until I find a vein,” she tells me several times before she sticks me. She is, in fact, a very talented phlebotomist. They have those butterfly things now that make drawing blood a lot easier. When I was younger, pre-butterflies, my doctor sent me to many specialists to try and figure out why my period was so irregular (clearly this lead nowhere, as it still is very irregular — these colors don’t run, baby! And they damn near never get their period). I had to get a good amount of blood taken, often, for a handful of months during my time as a teen. Once, at the endocrinologist, I was getting so much blood taken that the phlebotomist asked me to hold the empty vials in my free hand. I stared at them and thought about how they would soon be full of my blood. My candy apple phlebotomist today did not make me do that. I told her about it though.

I waited in the next room to get a flu shot. While the nurse finished up inputting info for the man before me, he came out of the adjacent bathroom. He looked me up and down. “God bless you, you’re very pretty.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He looked at my hand. “Oh, you don’t have a ring on!”

I lifted my left hand and looked at my moon and star ring on my middle finger. God damn. I should wear it on my ring finger. But then what if one day that stopped Mr. Right from approaching me! I do not think that this man in his mid-fifties holding a cup of his own urine is Mr. Right, though, so today I wish I wore it on my ring finger.

I get my flu shot (better late than never, I guess) and return to the doctor to get my actual physical. I haven’t gotten a physical in nearly five years. A very intimate experience to have with a complete stranger, I feel. Though I suppose I do know her address... I take it back — we’re very close.

I’m still worried that my insurance will somehow not cover all of this, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.