26th
The Usual Suspects
Sitting in the waiting room of Kaiser Permanente this morning, smoked out of doctor hiding by a salmon colored rash below my left eye (Note to self: One wrinkle cream is sufficinet, three results in pink scaliness which is less attractive than wrinkles), I pondered why this doctor’s office freaks me out even more than most.
I always get the high blood pressure, the neurotic joke-making followed by pulling my arm hair out, realizing this looks neurotic, and subsequently tearing up like a five year-old. But here it’s worse. For one thing, you have to pay a dollar to park and once you’re inside the malllike multi-leveled structure, you feel you’re in for good, they own your car, they own you, you would have to rush the orange and white barrier (“Save yourself, sweet Latino ticket taker, you angel working Death’s toll booth!”) to make a quick escape if, say, they were chasing you with needles…
Maybe I shouldn’t say “you.” Everyone else looked pretty calm. I was congratualting myself on believably pretending to read my book while thinking, “I’m not coming back out, Dear God, I will die in here.” I was staring blandly out the windows at the Glendale foothills, so green under a grey swell of storm clouds that I wanted to take a big, dirt clodden bite, and repeating the chilling words in my head, “Kaiser Permanente, Kaiser Permanente, Kaiser Permanente…” when they morphed suddenly into, “Keyser Soze, Keyser Soze.”
God, I mean that MIGHT explain the sheer terror I experience deep in my core at the mere mention of the place, and the reason I allowed a month-long flu to persist into a 2 month flu citing, “They’ll just tell me to get in bed, take vitamin C, and watch Sex and the City which, hello? I’m already DOING.” (The real fear being they would diagnose a runny nose and minor depression and tell me to go back to work).
But Still. Keyser Soze. I let that one rattle its own mantra a few times and realized my blood pressure was not in fact shooting skyward. I am less afraid of the mafia than I am of the doctor, particularly an HMO, particularly one where you have to pay for parking. This is when they call my name. There is of course that split second where a dumb white flash of a thought says, “Ignore her, just keep reading,” but knee jerk reaction beats out thought every time and I am standing and doing my pleasantly surprised face, ‘Why, that’s me! Aren’t I lucky, not much of a wait today,’ knowing in my heart that this moment may be one of my last.
The Diagnosis: Over the counter hydro-cortizone cream (no more expensive wrinkle creams…okay, okay, I think, fingers crossed). Okay, easy enough, I walk out not feeling too resentful about my parking dollar, thinking maybe these Kaiser folks (Kaiser, Erin, not KEYSER) know a little something about some things, not that I’d trust them to my thyroid or anything.
In the ointments aisle of Rite-Aid I turn into a stalking predator. It seems cortizone cream is used for more than just rashes of the eye, and there is not a box in sight without the large word ANAL or ANUS or RECTAL. I fucking refuse to buy something that says that. I have in the past, despite my (let’s face it, unhealthy) youth-obsession, refused to buy the skin-tightening Preperation-H because God forbid the check-out girl think I have hemmoroids.
Damn it. I skulk, squint-eyed, looking for a box with the SAME ingredients but a DIFFERENT use. When other people invade the (MY) aisle, I sashay browser style, “Can’t quite find what I’m lookin’ for,” and my eyebrows say, “Ha, certainly not this shelf.” My territorial pacing frightens away an old man who I think is probably after the SAME product I am but for a DIFFERENT purpose.
I finally settle on one that only has the words anus and rectal in small print on the back, along with other words like eczema, rash, and poison oak— things I am much more comfortable with. I throw in a box of Air-Born to show that I am ailing, not hemmoroidal. As I leave with my bag of purchases I am certain I now feel an itch on my eye BALL, not LID, and that the fucking HMO “doctor” has, as usual I suspect (har, har), misdiagnosed me.
