The Consistency of Couch Potatoes

It is 3AM and the pain in my knees is keeping me awake.

I roll over and flail for my glasses, knocking a pen, my alarm clock, and a bottle of body moisturizer off the bed-stand. Cringing as all three crunch into a bag of Salsa Verde Doritos, I barely catch my glasses as they too attempt a suicide dive.

“I can’t afford to replace you!” I remind them, shaking them a little too vigorously.

My vision right now is 20/600. My back-up glasses are 20/400. So if my current pair break, I would be blind for several weeks until a new pair arrived.

I pat my glasses apologetically and put them on. I know who’s boss.

Still half asleep, I stumble through books, piles of paper, and empty Mountain Dew cans. “Frik,” I mumble, tripping over a nest of phone and printer cables. “I’ma light ya on fire some day.”

I stop.

“I’ma light ya on fire some day?”

What the fuck?

I emerge from clutter and chaos five minutes later, rummaging for a hot water bottle in the upstairs bathroom.

Waiting for the tap to run, well, hot water, I slouch to the ground and stare at my knees: swollen and slightly bruised. ‘You aren’t my knees,’ I think. ‘Bad knees, go away.’ They are disinclined to obey.

Having spent the last four months primarily in front of my television and computer, I don’t know what I was expecting. That my legs still had the stamina to stand for that long? Yeah. Probably. I mean, DUDE – four hours. Four.

“This is fucking embarassing,” I say, still staring at my knees.

With the hot water bottle resting on my legs, I do eventually fall back to sleep. I awake some five hours later, pain free.

And there is a spring in my step.

Crap.

 

My bite is worse than my bark.

It has been two years since my last dentist appointment. Two years. Typically, this would be due to my neglectful spirit, but that is not the answer this time. You see, they just didn’t send me the usual happy postcard a year ago, stating, “Alisa! You’re freakin’ awesome! You need to come see us, so we can fill your awesome cavaties with awesome filling goo.”

So, I step into the dentist’s office at 11:43 (for my 11:30 appointment) and glare at a white wall before being whisked into the back.

“Sorry I’m late,” I mumble to the medical assistant. “We…took a wrong turn?” We hadn’t. Duh. My internal monologue says, ‘You’re fat.”

“Oh, it’s all right!” she replies cheerfully. “Those things happen.” She sounds sincere. Dude. I feel bad.

I sit down in my chair and stare ahead of me. Another white wall.

“We’re going to do this really quickly.”

Um…okay. After all, it’s only been two years since my last visit.

I sit for twenty minutes with her hands in my mouth. The taste of the blue latex gloves gags me. My saliva gags me. The plaque pick she nearly drops down my throat gags me. I hate this. And then, just as I begin willing death upon some third world children, it’s over. Suddenly, my social consciousness floods back and the internal monologue begins again:

“I’m a terrible person. I’m a terrible person who wants third world children to die. I should die - I pictured them being stabbed by stick-wielding elephants. And then the elephants trampled them. OMG. I need to do something to help them. Have some money! Have some money! Take my goddamn money! The karma will get me if you don’t… Wow, she’s still pretty damn fat.”

I watch the assistant waddle away. Ten minutes later, the dentist walks in, looks at my teeth, and says, “Ideally, you would get some orthodontic work…”

“No. My teeth don’t bother me as they are.”

After all, they’re straight. There’s no crowding. No, I am not going to have my jaw broken and moved back for vanity’s sake!

“Are you sure?”

Just as sure as I was two seconds ago, thanks.

“Yes.”

“All right.” He stands and leaves.

So…am I done? You’ve walked away. You didn’t say anything. Am I done? Come on, tell me. I’m not just going to sit here forever.

A second medical assistant enters the room, unhooks the dribble bib from my neck, and begins to walk away. She pauses at the door.

“Oh, by the way, you’re done.”

Gee.

 

Dr. Doug

I am sitting in my pediatrics office for the last time. Yes, I know, I have been 18 for a while now and yet I’ve been back to my childhood doctor’s office twice already. But this visit is final, if not primarily because I am off to college in a month, then because the new doctor reminds me of Doug on King of Queens. Not just “reminds” me – he must be. He is built like Doug. He walks like Doug. He even wears cologne that smells just as I would imagine Doug smelling. In short, he IS Doug…with a doctorate. This frightens and confuses me.

My mother has been researching what my ailment might be, considering that two EEG’s, a complete cardio work-up, and multiple blood tests have revealed nothing. So she walks up to Dr. Doug with a bunch of computer print-outs and declares that I must have some kind of vestibular disorder, aka. ear trouble. I sit around as she blathers. Doug kind of spaces out. Then he does the usual things new doctors do when they hear about my problem….he checks my eyes and ears and turns back to my mother.

“What are her symptoms?” he asks her.

Hi, I’m over here. But, alright, he’s a kid doctor; I’ll cope.

“She’s dizzy and lightheaded,” my mother tells him. “She’s had some fainting spells, and she was diagnosed with labyrinthitis last month. But she finished her medication for that and it didn’t go away. It just seems to be getting worse over the years.”

“Hm…is it a room spinning kind of dizzy?”

“I…don’t know.”

“No,” I declare from my corner of the room. “I just feel really lightheaded and weak. My vision goes black and my arms get really warm.”

Doug looks at me for the first time.

“Movie fade-out kind of black?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.” Mumble mumble. Scribble scribble.

“So…?”

“Okay.”

Dude, “okay” what?

His questions continue. I recite the same list of symptoms and explanations that I have rattled off more than a dozen times in the past six years. Mumble mumble. Scribble scribble. Doug is starting to annoy me: he offers no conjectures, no possibilities. He just mumbles and scribbles, and then he stops both and sends for a nurse to check my blood pressure three times, while I’m lying down, sitting up, and standing. She makes me lean against the wall for fear I can’t tell if I’m going to fall over.

My mother asks for a referral so that her insurance will cover the physical therapy. He stares blandly. Physical therapy, mom? He never agreed with your conclusion. But, then, Dougie doesn’t really have any ideas of his own. We all start to leave, and then:

“Oh, and by the way – she was diagnosed with Sensory Integration Disorder when she was younger, and they mentioned something about ‘vestibular’ something-or-other. Does that add anything to this?”

No. SID isn’t medically accepted. It isn’t “provable.” You know that.

It’s obvious that he barely knows what she’s talking about.

“I don’t…think so…” he says cheerfully.

As we stand at the window to pay, the doctor walks over to answer the receptionist’s question about a referral. He looks at the computer screen and furrows his brow. Oh my God, he looks just like Doug! He is so awesome.