I’m sitting on this metal, paper-covered waiting table, the steel positively freezing my ass. Stupid coverlet gown besides, like. Wondering when the doctor’ll show up, if when and ever. Twenty minutes, staring disinterestedly at the walls, picking through and reading similarly disinteresting pamphlets; about abortion, about the HIV, about cancer and smoking and rickets and anything else that may strike me as funny.
But mostly wondering when the doctor will show up.
The pain in my balls is a dull, reverberating type’a thud, nails across the chalkboard kind of thing. Not pain-ful, to be precise, but a nonplussing dissimilarity to normalcy as to give me grief on an all-encompassing scale. HERNIA, I say to myself. Got-to has-to must-be. No other way. Shifting rocks on the trails, two weeks back. That’s the only answer. Two weeks since, bowels grinding away antagonistically in an offhand fashion. Altering everything. I wonder when the doctor will show up, with a rising irritation. I’m running out of things to peruse, and find myself re-skimming the pamphlet on Ebola. I wonder if I’ll even be seen by a doctor; the town has maybe four hundred, five-hundred-folk-tops. Small Alaskan villar on the brink of nowhere. Probably moonlights as a vet, this doc-tor. Have me sent up the knack, with a bit of ginger even; the way I’m feeling. And just as my internal rant builds-
he's there, open door white jacket smiles and all. Doddering old fellow, if anything. More wrinkles and bits of skin than man, for sure. I wonder; but I wondered enough already, as it is. He comes in all smiles and jacket and perspicacity, asking this that and the other, perforce with his duties off-the-cuff like. All I can do is think and answer, be a patient. My testes began hurting two weeks before, I explain. We’d been building a trail, I say. Never had such trouble before, I extrapolate. Perhaps a hernia, I fish, hoping for some sort of answer to the nay or contrary.
“Only one way to find out,” he says, disapproving-like. The rest bit is sort of a blur; gropey-gropey-coughy-negative, with a vague depiction afterwards of shredded valves and possible infections. “Do you wear jockeys?” he asks, and it takes me a bit to mull it out; I’m a boxer man, I guess. “Got to wear jockeys,” he says tut-tuttily. “Need the support, in your condition.” He writs me off a note for plenty of ibuprofen and supportive briefs and ushers me out towards the lobby. “I’ll put it down as a possible hernia, for your workman’s comp,” he adds as I’m out the door, with a wink on the sly like.
I stand in the lob, done and finished but unsure where to go for the now. Middle of the workday, clearing the local airstrip of weeds and debris; besides that, my mate’s coat is still on the hook, meaning he’s probably still in for his check-up. White – his name, that is – is in for a blood exam or two, what with the last weekend and all. Asking me about my know-how of the HIV and its symptoms and such. White as a sheet over the whole thing, pardon the expression. Who knew that girl was a pro? In the Yukon, of all places! Well, work is work, but you’ve got to look out for your friends; so I take a seat in the lob and grab myself a Food and Wine, for lack of much else to dick over. And it strikes me {looking over some Fourth-of-July steak special recipes} that the old doc never donned a pair of gloves, mulling me over as he did.
“Dirty world,” is all I can say to that; and I feel an awful urge to go and wash in the lav.
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