He stared straight ahead at the glass-encased reception window, nervously waiting for his name to be called. Other people were milling about, nameless and faceless, and a magazine rack stood at attention on the wall to the left of him. He heard jingling, like keys or coins or both, and was vaguely aware of his right knee bouncing up and down rhythmically. He felt a gentle touch on that knee, which did nothing to abate the tremors.
“Daddy? Are you nervous?”
The voice was kind, gentle, and familiar. He broke out of his reverie to gaze at the hand which rested on his knee, the arm with which it was attached, and the woman whose body the arm belonged. Sandy, his daughter. No longer with pigtails, but a grown woman with children of her own. He snapped up and his head turned to face his daughter.
“You have no idea.”
Memories came spilling back onto Sandy like a waterfall under which she allowed the water to flow over her, relentlessly. A burden upon which only she could shoulder. It was maybe ten years ago that she and her mother occupied the same chairs in the same waiting room for the same diagnostic test. How could this be happening again? Lighting doesn’t strike twice, she thought.
In the intervening years, she watched the disease erode her mother to an avatar devoid of the love she desperately wanted to maintain. All that was left was a facsimile of the woman who raised her, shared tears with her, and counseled her on adolescent relationships. They had maybe two or three good years left before Sandy became only a kind stranger to her mother. then another couple before she was gone altogether. She couldn’t handle losing her father in the same manner.
“It will be ok, Daddy,” she tried to convince them both. But she knew that it likely wouldn’t be ok.
She recognized the decline with her father, with forgetting minor things at first, then missing appointments, bouncing checks, and she tried to convince herself that it was just old age, and everyone forgets things. Two weeks ago, when he called her on a Tuesday morning from Mancelona, not quite sure how he got there, the mirage of “old age” vanished, and in its place was the very real thought of going through this all over again. That’s when she set the appointment with Dr. Gardner, and where she found herself once again.
“I hope so.” He said with a slightly worried look on his face.
The knee began bouncing on its own again, and with it the jingling of the contents of her father’s pocket.
“Henry Peterson.” The nurse called from the open doorway.
“I’m here,” Henry said, rising to his 6-foot-2-inch stature. “Hank,” he said in response, “I go by Hank.”
“Can my daughter come with me?”
“Sure,” the nurse, dressed in purple scrubs, opened the door wider as if they both would pass through at the same time. “Right this way.”
Sandy grabbed her purse and notebook and quickly followed her father into the confines of the medical practice.
“We are heading to room 3 on the left,” the nurse instructed Hank.
Henry had no trouble following the simple instructions and walked into the room with a brass number 3 on the door. It looked like any other room he had been in for various minor ailments. The examining table in the center of the room was covered in deli paper, like he was a tuna sandwich prepared to be wrapped up. There were two plastic chairs along the wall and a large rubber ball fixed in a plastic frame with castors under it.
Henry had been a patient of Dr. O’Brien for over two decades. Henry and Cliff both belonged to the same country club and would occasionally golf together on Monday afternoons in the informal men’s league. It was more social than competitive, but Henry enjoyed playing with Cliff and admired the way he could always read the greens and save par with a fifteen or twenty-foot putt. They had formed a decent enough friendship in which Henry was invited to call him at home if ever anything came up. He was an old-school doctor, and when he started his practice, he would make house calls with his black bag and prescription pad. Henry would never call Dr. O’Brien at home, as he saw that as an invasion of his private time with his own family, but he wasn’t above cornering him in the locker room at the club to ask a medical question or ask him for an opinion on a new growth that popped up on his skin.
Due to all of the changes in the practice of medicine, namely, new requirements by the insurance carriers and the electronic medical record system, Dr. O’Brien decided that the practice of medicine was no longer for him. He sold his interest and all of the patients to his partner of seven years, Dr. Gardner. Henry had met with her a couple of times and had no problem with a female doctor as a practitioner, although he found parts of his physical exam to be awkward.
Hank naturally sat on the deli paper and made a joke to the nurse about not forgetting the pickle when they were finished. Due to the nature of the visit, the nurse did not get the joke and instructed him to sit on one of the plastic chairs. He hopped off and looked at his daughter for some support, but Sandy was too busy setting her purse on the floor and opening a new page in her notebook.
The nurse sat on the ball chair and scooted over to Henry and said, “We’re just going to get a few vitals from you, ok?” She spoke as if to a child, which bothered Hank.
He rolled up his sleeve and held out his arm, ready for the blood pressure cuff. The nurse was efficient and all business. Hank felt like he was on a production line instead of a person in a doctor’s office. There was no rapport. She scooted over to her laptop and typed in an enormous amount of information. It seemed too long to have just been his blood pressure, temperature, and pulse. Was she writing a story?
“Dr. Gardner will be in shortly,” and with that, the purple blur exited the room, leaving Hank and Sandy alone, sitting side by side in this sterile room.