The Pox in Pandora’s Box
These past two months have been brutal for my eight year-old daughter. A few weeks ago she suffered through pneumonia and today she was diagnosed with strep throat.
Getting through to the nurse was like calling FM106 KMEL in 1984, hungry like the wolf for some free Duran Duran tickets. I had speed dial working and actually heard something I haven’t heard since the advent of the Information Age: a busy signal.
I stayed home from work; Josie summoned me using my Liberty Bell award from last year’s 2:34 at the Philly Marathon: a distant memory that hearkens back to faster times every time that I am summoned with it–its incessant pealing a vivid reminder that I’m not in the shape that I once was and may never be again.
We got lost in the shuffle at the doctor’s office and waited for 30 minutes past our appointment time. I went up to the desk and did my very best Nikita KruschevNikita Khrushchev sans shoe and so we got seen very shorty after that. Sick loved-ones bring out the Soviet dictator in all of us. You need to be a Soviet dictator when dealing with the health care system. I’m convinced of that.
We got ushered into a room with horrid art work: three or four original paintings of happy mothers holding happy babies (where are the dads on the wall?). The mothers got their mouths open, mimicking the open mouths of their giggling bubbly little progenies. The brush strokes are crude; the colors are all Miami Vice pastels. That world doesn’t exist, especially not in a doctor’s office.
Yuck.
No one is happy in these places so let’s get real.
Doctor’s offices require Edvard Munch:
and:
The biggest disappointment out of all this is that my daughter’s sickness has ruined a planned weekend trip to NYC. I was reading Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice (and three other books simultaneously, located in various dubious sitting places throughout my pied-a-terre) thanks to my aquaintance(sic). I was all geared up to talk to the elves at Macys and then write about it.
Oh well. Maybe I’ll paint something instead and surreptitiously stick it up on the wall when I take Josie back into the doctors for a checkup. I’ll replace the CrockettnTubbs happy moms with something dark, something sinister, something inherently masculine, reminding the room’s occupants that they aren’t there to cuddle and make nice: They are there because they are in pain. I’m closing my eyes. . .I’m seeing Nikita Kruschev Nikita Khrushchev. He’s standing in front of the U.N. General Assembly. The painting is black and white. He’s got a syringe in his hands and a terrified baby lays below him. The painting will be called “We will bury you!” or something like that.
WE WILL BURY YOU!.
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Seeing my daughter in pain today made me think about the most ridiculous movie known to man: Gods and Generals.
I only made it through about the first ten minutes of it. I got to the scene where Stonewall Jackson is doing some cheesy thing with his home slave (read:wife). He’s listening to her play the harpsichord or he’s reading the Bible with her; they are exchanging drippy pleasantries with some nauseating music playing in the background. Whatever. It makes no difference; it was straight up torture to watch and so I shut the DVD off and promptly took it back whence it came. (That night I remember, I got hit by a drunk driver while I was riding my mountain bike back to the video store to return Godsnpoop–yeeehaw!)
It’s all a bunch of flowery malarkey.
There is no ideal.
When the pain train comes to town, it turns even Stonewall Jackson into an ogre. Pain brings out the worst in all of us. It’s very hard to care for someone in pain. There’s no speech, like that attributed to Jackson’s last words, about “crossing over the river and resting under the shade of the trees.” No music plays. No one stands there clad in Robin Hood tights like some Lord Byron holding a long quill, recording it all in some thick, dusty book of legendary lies.
There’s this Jackson upon being dropped in his stretcher, landing on his left arm with two fresh minnie balls lodged in it (fired by skittish Confederate pickets in the gloaming):
“AAAH!!!!!! This fucking hurts! I’m going to kill you! You motherfucker!!!! You drop me again and I will cut your balls off! So sayeth Cain before he puteth Abel under the knife, so I sayeth to you, you nearsighted Georgian ape! You get me some whiskey lickety-split. My left arm fucking hurts and that means that I need to get shit-faced ASAP!”
Naturally my daughter didn’t talk like this, but she’s given me what-for all day and I can’t say that I blame her.
She’s in pain: she’s human.