My husband was among the many unfortunate souls to contract the flu this season, just in time to spend Christmas weekend in bed. He was fine when he left for work in the morning, but called me to say he was heading home early and feeling miserable. We knew it was the flu-- a coworker with whom he’d had a good long meeting had tested positive the previous day. Timing is everything, they say.
“I know you don’t feel like it, but why don’t you swing by the minute clinic on the way home? You can walk-in and get Tamiflu; might as well cut short the suffering,” I advised, making a mental note to make up the guest bed and buy a surgical mask.
Hours later he came dragging in and went straight to bed.
“Did you get some medicine?”
“No.”
“Then where were you for so long?”
Apparently walk-in is a relative term during flu season. He proceeded to tell me a sad tale about driving out of his way and being snubbed by a nurse-practitioner in what appeared to be an empty Walgreen’s clinic . She was just finishing up with the only person present, but insisted that he make an appointment to return across town two hours later. To quote a recent YouTube favorite of ours, Heather Land, he said “I ain’t doin’ it,” and crawled under the covers. By the next day, however, he was desperate.
“I will make an on-line appointment for the walk-in clinic,” I offered. Which is an oxymoron, by the way. “We can just show up at the appointed time, you can get what you need and get back to resting.” Forty-five minutes later he bravely roused the energy to swing his feet over the side of the bed. We bundled optimistically into the car. I got some interesting looks driving down Fairburn Road in my latex gloves and surgical mask, spraying Lysol towards the passenger seat where he lay fully reclined. Don’t judge me. Just because you love someone does not mean you want to share his misery.
We arrived at the designated time to discover that an appointment at a walk-in clinic is pretty much the same as an appointment at any other doctor’s office. The time is not really the time. The time you are told to show up is always at least one hour before the time you are actually invited into the inner sanctum to wait at least twenty more minutes while the doctor is mysteriously detained. Is someone birthing a baby in there? Maybe. Checking Facebook and eating a Frosty while enjoying a DOL-mandated ten minute break? More likely. I left the patient moaning in the car and signed him in. A little while later he dragged in to find me cowering behind the magazine display, avoiding all the sick people clustered hopefully around the Doorway from which the doctor would eventually emerge.
“Only three people in front of you, not counting the person who looked perfectly fine, but has been in there chatting things up for thirty minutes,” I helpfully informed him as he collapsed onto a chair next to a woman in similar dire straits. “Either he’s done her taxes or convinced her to go on a date by now.”
Three hundred dollars, two hours and fifteen minutes later (there was a wait at the in-house pharmacy for the prescription), I strapped my surgical mask back onto my face and drove my fevered, achy, coughing significant other back to the comfort of home. Not even those brilliant ladies from Hidden Figures that calculated a safe trajectory for a manned rocket could make sense of it. You know it’s the flu, I know it’s the flu, we all know it’s the flu, but at the apogee of misery let’s not just call something in, let’s drag someone out of bed to run the gauntlet and spread the germs.
A few weeks previous I had been laid rather low by an insidious virus, the kind that makes you look favorably through bleary eyes at the grim reaper and wonder if it is possible that your stomach has literally turned inside out. “Either get me some Phenergan or shoot me,” I begged. Alas, my doctor’s secretary said I would have to come into the office to get any relief. I could barely lift my head above the bowl I was hugging. “I ain’t doin’ it,” I said. Thank heaven it was a twenty-four hour thing. I recovered, as did my husband from his little Christmas present, and we really did try to be grateful that our immune systems were capable of doing their jobs, as so many people had it so much worse. There was, however, an occasion for resentment.
A month or so after his brush with the flu and still fighting an irritating cough, Pete came wheeling in around a familiar Suburban parked in our driveway. He greeted Dr. Leslie as she said goodbye to Katie and Magic Tom and loaded her laptop and “tackle” box of syringes and medicines.
“What’s up? Everything okay?” he asked.
“Oh, Katie just got her check-up and vaccinations. Tom was off the hook and loving it, because the last time Dr. Leslie came she took him away to an undisclosed location for the big snip. There’s obviously some sibling rivalry at work. I can tell he was enjoying Katie’s shots a little too much.”
“So, you’re telling me that we can be on death’s door and have to drag ourselves to a waiting room where we sit in extreme discomfort for hours, but the cats get house calls.” Pete shook his head in disbelief. I think this injustice was even more painful than the tiime he rolled up after a long July day on a busy job site, surly, sweaty and wiped out by the heat, only to witness our Jack Russell Terrier, Cotton, emerge from the pool and sprawl across her towel on a cushy lounge chair. They do say dogs have family, and cats have staff. In fact, I write these last few lines with my laptop in a very awkward position on the arm of my chair, since Katie decided to make herself comfortable and sprawled across the keyboard mid-sentence. Maybe there is something to be learned here. Maybe, like cats, we should be a little more entitled and demanding.
I think if we the citizens of the United States ever do truly get affordable health care from our Congress, they should consider the mobile veterinary model. I would be so grateful when I am sick, just to stay in my pajamas under a warm blanket and have the medicine come to me. I would promise not to bite or scratch and would never have to be scruffed or muzzled. I wonder if Dr. Leslie has Phenergan or Tamiflu in that tackle box…
