This is just a little something i wrote a …ahem..few..years ago.
At 26 I’m not old. I’m not. I’m middle. Here in the quarter life I’ve found that I’m a lot more attuned to any weird physical blemishes or sicknesses that I encounter. Things at 20 that would “go away after a week or so” or would “stop hurting in a few days” aren’t given that much time. More than often, minutes are even a stretch before I find myself dialing my parents or my doctor friends. Sickness now is not as innocent as it was when I was younger. It is much more powerful and evil, and a sore throat could possibly be Strep, mono, or a rare case of some disease that I got while drinking two day old chocolate milk that they “haven’t found the cure for, but will kill you in 3 days.”
Not long ago I found a bump on the left side of my face next to my sideburn. (By the way, sideburn is a word that is used almost entirely in the plural sense and is much more creepy in the singular setting. Try it. Sideburn. Ewww.) I was sure it was a zit or mosquito bite and would go away in a few days.
Now, I wish I could tell you that at 26 I’m done with the pimple/zit war, and I think that I am MOSTLY, but there are bits of shrapnel left over from my pubescent scuffle. I still do get a zit now and then.
An interesting thing happened with this new “bump”; it didn’t go away, but would change shapes according to what time of the day it was. Now, I don’t mean that it would be the state of Mississippi for a few minutes at 10am, then turning into the face of Garfield at 12:30 – I mean that it would vary in sizes. Sometimes it was like something was busting out of the side of my face, feeling like it was so big I would have to turn sideways to get into my apartment; other times it was gently sleeping, barely risen above the level of the rest of my skin.
While I was hosting this “bump” I went back home to my parents house in Knoxville. Upon entering the house, my Dad saw it and quickly said I should “really go get it checked out because you never know if this could be a type of cancer” and he’s “seen a lot of things like this be a mole that is cancerous,” etc. I called a dermatologist and set up and appointment, excited to finally get to use the health insurance I had been paying for a year or so.
I got to the doctor’s office an hour early (long story) and filled out the forms that I needed to, talking for a while to the sweet Secretary who had just begun working there. An hour later I came back ready for my visit.
Something interesting happened as I sat in the waiting room - I immediately started scanning the room to find the dermatological problems of my fellow patients. Birthmarks in the shape of Guatemala; Moles that circle one of the eyes. I didn’t find anything exciting and found that as I was scanning others, I myself was being scanned. Quickly I learned how to talk on my phone with my left ear.
A nurse came out and called my name. I got excited, but in a different way – I had won the battle of getting into the doctor first, but had lost the security of the life I had once known. The life where everything was okay, and whatever the thing on the side of my face would “go away by next month.”
We walked through the maze of the office and she had me sit on the meat packing paper bed thingy. I sat there, excited to finally get some time to sit down and quiz my dermatologist. I was paying 30 bucks, after all, and it was kind of like buying someone’s time, so I was ready for him to earn the 30 wampum.
“So what EXACTLY is a mole?”
“Are birth marks contagious?”
“If my moles make a constellation when connected by a marker, does that mean that I’m really a super hero?”
My doctor came in as I was halfway through a Fortune magazine. He was older, which I wasn’t ready for. He came in and addressed me so quickly and tactfully, I felt as if he might have escaped from a local prison and had run into the clinic looking for a hideout as the cops chased him. I can imagine it right now –
Doctor quickly opens and shuts the door, fumbles through the info sheet as he nervously looks around; he immediately goes straight into questioning without ever looking at Dave.
Doc – “Mr. Burns”
Dave – “Barnes.”
Doc – “Right. So let’s see what the problem is – you have a…bump? on your face…?.”
Dave – “Yes, sir. Right here.”
Doc – “That’s fine. NO need to worry. Okay. You look good. I’m out of here.”
(Doc opens the door, looks both ways and begins to hurriedly walk out)
Dave – “But Doc. Don’t you think that you should check out the rest of my moles? I have quite a few of them.”
Doc – (coming back in, and shaking his head, as if he knew better) “Of COURSE. Of course. Okay, take your shirt off. There we go. Okay. Whoa. You seem to have two HUGE problem areas there.” (Pointing at my chest)
Dave – “Those are my nipples.”
Doc – “Right. Of course they are! I knew that. Just seeing if you ….knew…THAT!”
(Doctor quickly throws down white jacket, revealing his dirty torn clothes and runs out of the room, the door shutting behind him.)
It wasn’t quite that bad, but I’ve never experienced a doctor more on a mission. He looked at the side of my face, told me it was nothing, just a “swollen gland” and asked if there was anything else I needed. YES, there was something else I needed, I needed to fully explore the time and space that my 30 dollars had bought. I asked him if he wanted to check out the rest of my body, which he did. I took my shirt off, and after a few hmm, alright, yeah, and ummhhmm noises, he asked me to take my pants off.
“Take your pants off.”
This is a command that has sent fear and excitement through every man alive. It is a funny phrase, because when you WANT to hear it, there is nothing like it. Nothing. When you DON’T want to hear it, there might be no worse group of words.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve grown up changing in locker rooms and in best friends houses and been in all too many situations demanding my pants being off. That was not the issue. The issue was being told that I HAD to….by a man. I felt like he should have too. That way we would have been on even ground, both of us standing there, checking each other out for moles.
He didn’t agree, but I didn’t ask.
