Now, you have to understand that even though my daughter threatens to kill me and bury me in a deep, deep hole in the backyard, she does love me. She doesn't generally say it in so many words, preferring to show her love by headbutting me in the groin or by jumping on me when I'm laying on the couch and kneeing me in the groin or, when she's feeling especially affectionate, just letting loose with an Ivan Drago cockpunch right in my groin. Her methods of demonstrating her love are many and varied, so when she told me a few weeks back that "Daddy, I don't want to lose you," and didn't punctuate this statement with a shoe thrown to the groin, I figured it was time to start taking my health a little more seriously.
Here's what you need to know about me in order to properly gauge my current state of health: I am an American. This of course means that I'm horribly out of shape, distressingly lazy and that Ben & Jerry are more than masters of the art of the ice cream, they are also the names that I have given my love handles.
So wanting to perhaps live until Sophie is old enough to make me wish that I were actually dead, I made myself an appointment for a check up at the doctor, which is where I was this afternoon (following a mid-morning trip to see Iron Man 2, which I might talk about later on, unless I am distracted by something shiny tomorrow and want to talk about that instead--the brain is loose and free-flowing these days). I haven't been to see a doctor in about three years, which is much too long when you're old, wrinkled, out of shape and just generally a lazy, lazy fuck. This is actually the year where everything about me has started to fall apart anyway (knees, sore shin, sore back, general exhaustion and overall feeling of what I believe is medically termed blah), and so off to the doctor I did went.
Surprisingly, I was not asked to wrap myself in a fashionable assless paper gown, which I remembered as being standard dress whilst being poked and prodded by your physician. Have things changed that much since the last time I've been? I was a bit disappointed to not have to put one on, to tell the truth. I usually like to take that opportunity to give an example of how completely and totally at ease with my being out of shape I really am, which again being an American means that I'm actually horribly embarrassed by what a fat ass I've become, but I have to play it cool for the doctor anyway. It's a little dance we men like to do, especially when our doctor is the same age we are, in much better shape than we could ever hope to be, and is of course a shockingly hot chick, the sort of doctor that you only see in two places: on prime time television hospital dramas, and directly in front of you while you are fat, wheezing and dressed in a sandwich bag from which your pale ass protrudes like an oversized Hostess Snowball.
So being able to stay in my street clothes completely threw me out of my game. Where was the awkwardness that I've come to expect from going for a physical? Where was the sense of shame and a life wasted that comes with a hot doctor poking you in your flab, searching for a lost Dorito that may have gotten trapped under a layer of fat somewhere while you were watching 30 Rock and daydreaming about Tina Fey in the Catwoman costume from the old Batman TV show?
Well, I found it when it was time for a hernia check.
See, when you're dressed in your little paper gown, you're expecting to be examined in all sorts of swimsuit areas. Why else would your ass be exposed to the world, and the hem of your gown only dropped to slightly below testicle level? Of course there will be a finger in your ass or an ice cold hand cupping your balls. This exploration of your personal space is hardly a surprise at that point. The difference though when you're in your street clothes and the doctor tells you to drop 'em and offer up your goods is very, very freakish and weird. It doesn't quite feel like a molestation from your creepy uncle, but neither does it give you the warm and fuzzies that you would normally get from a gorgeous woman in a lab coat kneeling in front of you and feeling you up.
Since going to the doctor is unsettling enough when you're out of shape, I only paused for a moment before baring myself to her clammy gloved hand. What was a little more awkwardness piled upon that which I was already feeling up to this point? As a man, there's always this little worry in the back of your head when having your junk checked out by your physician that your stuff is going to be the one that in no way holds up to any of the other schlongs that have been waved about in this office before. Yours will be the one that will be discussed over mohitos and chicken wings by the medical staff at Applebee's after they clock out for the night.
“Turn your head and cough,” the doctor said, which I did without pause. It was a cliche command to be sure, but when a doctor tells you to do something, you do it. I’ve never understood what exactly the purpose of the head turning is in this situation. The coughing, sure, that I can get my head around. There’s nothing like a good harsh cough to tighten up the ol’ testicular area, but the head turn? Since I’ve somehow managed to only have female doctors throughout my adulthood, I’ve always assumed that its purpose is to make you look away from the doctor, so that you aren’t checking her out while she’s checking you out. This serves the double purpose of theoretically alleviating some of the tension that might be building up in the room from such an intimate act being performed, and also prevents you from coughing your nasty patient’s germs on the top of the doctor’s head while you’re staring down at her fondling your goods. Really it’s a win/win situation here: for the price of an insurance co-pay, you get a good fondling from a hot doctor, and she gets to not have you coughing on her luxurious physician’s hairdo. What’s not to love?
She had me turn my head in the other direction and asked me to give another cough. I wanted this one to be more manly than the last, so I closed my eyes and tried to cough as I thought Johnny Depp might when he visited his physician, with effortless suavity and rakish charm. Why, I’ll bet that with France’s socialized medicine, he probably went to have his Captain Sparrow checked out three or four times a year. Goddamn that Johnny Depp, I thought to myself. Both him and the French system of health care.
“You can pull up your pants, Mr. Paresis,” the doctor said. She pulled her rubber gloves off with a loud schwap and threw them into the trash can.
“I’m assuming everything is alright down there?” I asked. I tried to pull my boxers and pants up quickly, but not too quickly. Johnny Depp would have taken his time covering back up, and if it was good enough for Johnny, it was good enough for me.
She awarded me a sad, tired little smile. “It’s just fine,” she said. “Just fine.”
Just fine? I thought. Nobody wants to hear the words “just fine” when the subject of the discussion is one’s penis. I could think of any number of better responses to that question. “Everything is simply excellent,” perhaps, or “I’m sorry, I was thinking about the Washington Monument. What was the question again?”
At this point I had decided that whatever medical college my doctor had graduated from, she’d obviously elected to not sign up for Bedside Manners 101. Oh sure, she wasn’t as bad as some doctors that I’ve seen in my life, not by a long shot. There was the dentist who worked on an infected molar I’d had who insisted upon hacking at my wound with what felt like a miner’s pick, making Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man seem more like Robert Preston in The Music Man. Or there was the emergency room doctor that had sewn up a gash on my knee as though he was deep sea fishing off the coast of Florida, and my leg was the marlin that was caught on the line he was trying to reel back in.
“Anything specific you wanted me to check out?” she asked. I considered telling her about the pain in my shin that had been developing over the past couple of months that sometimes caused me to stumble when coming down the stairs, or the vicious headaches that had recently begun creeping into my brain, but being poked and prodded had lost its magic for me now. I could self diagnose these problems easily enough, the sore leg a result of me wearing five year old shoes that no longer supported my falling arches, the headaches nothing more than allergies brought on by the encroaching spring pollen season.
“No,” I said. “I feel just fine. Just fine.”
My visit concluded exactly how I had assumed it would, with orders to eat less fried and greasy food, to exercise more regularly and an assignment to report for a blood cholesterol test whenever it was most convenient for me. The doctor scribbled a few notes down in my chart, told me she would see me again in six months and then sent me out to the front desk to check out. While I was waiting in line, I noticed that someone had left an ice cooler on the floor against the wall, and being in a hospital, the only thing I could think of was there was an organ in that box, and it had been inadvertently left behind by its delivery person. Right this very second, there was a heart packed in ice down there, waiting to be gently placed into someone’s chest like the Christ child into the hay in the manger, or maybe another liver for Steve Jobs, just in case he needed a backup. I knew this was of course an absurd assumption on my part, that there was no way an organ delivery would get lost in a hospital, and even if it did, it certainly wouldn’t end up in the Immediate Care wing—although I’m sure that in a way “immediate care” would be precisely the category that an organ transplant would fall under.
What really struck me as odd about the cooler—other than the organ that unquestionably rested on a bed of ice within it—was that instead of having the normal lid that one would generally find, something flat with maybe circular indentations for putting your cans of sodas in, this one was closed off with the rounded lid of a pirate’s chest. It wasn’t a real pirate’s chest of course, but rather a Halloween version of one, made of purple molded plastic in the shape of wooden slats, with a dead man’s skull resting at one corner and purple plastic gold doubloons leaking out a crack at the other end.
What in the world was in there? It was March, and I doubted that it was a forgotten Halloween decoration that had been there for the past five months. Even given that it was positioned in such a way in front of and below the checkout window that it couldn’t be seen by the woman behind the counter, there must have been a hundred times a day that hospital employees passed right by this spot. Someone certainly would have noticed it by now and pointed it out.
“So that’s where that got to,” the checkout woman would say. “I’ve been looking all over for that. I thought we’d thrown it out by mistake. You can’t have a Halloween without a pirate’s chest, you know. That would be like Christmas without a tree, or Easter without the Resurrection.”
I wanted to make a move and open the lid, but I’d made myself nervous with the entire idea of it. What if it was a hospital practical joke? What if there really was an organ in there? Oh, not a healthy and useful one. Who would want to waste a perfectly good kidney? Maybe though there were some blackened lungs or a fatty gray heart from a cadaver left there as part of the hazing of a new employee. Maybe—and this is the idea that cemented itself inside my head—maybe there was a severed penis in there.
Suddenly everything made sense. At that very moment, there was a giant severed johnson in that cooler, the size of a child’s forearm, put there by the very physician I had just been examined by, obviously as a practical joke against a co-worker. Of course! Mere moments before she had come into the exam room to check me out, she (perhaps assisted by a few of her giggling physician partners) had snipped the massive winky off a corpse down in the morgue with the express purpose of hiding it in a box left out in the open where it couldn’t be missed by a hospital worker, and hilarity would ensue. This was of course why she had been less than enthused when presented with my own, still attached, member. Who wouldn’t have reacted the same way? If you’ve just eaten a juicy footlong Coney Island dog with the works for lunch, of course you don’t even have the slightest interest in a little weenie you have to nuke in your own home microwave. And by little, I mean of course average.
It was my turn at the window then, and I handed my insurance card to the receptionist. “I’m checking out,” I said.
“How was everything?” she asked me with a smile.
“Oh, fine,” I said. “Just fine.”
And actually, it was.
