My health insurance company sends out a doctor or nurse practitioner once a year to assess customers’ health, I assume so the company knows what is coming down the turnpike. That is, they are assessing future risk. If they know my heart condition is progressing, they can project their future payouts or figure out what tests and procedures might be coming so they can prepare to deny coverage.
As long as Americans agree to farm out our healthcare to private companies, healthcare will always be about generating profits rather than promoting wellness. It’s (currently) the American way.
A nurse practitioner named Lindsey visited me this week. She was big, and she packed a lot of stuff, so she had a hard time navigating the narrow hallway from my front door to the living room. Eventually she made it without losing one of her giant doctor bags and commenced her “examination.” No new maladies were discovered. After several years of doctor’s office visits, blood tests, diagnoses, and prescriptions, I’ve pretty much run the gamut of what is currently wrong with me. I’m over it. I had no new complaints, so after updating her on my current status, she checked my meds and remarked that I only took five different drugs, which apparently is some kind of victory.
She asked me how my memory was, and I shrugged and said it wasn’t what it used to be and I wish it were better. She said, let’s do a cognitive test. I immediately thought of a certain person and said, you mean like man, woman, camera, TV? She flashed perfect teeth at me. Like that, she said. She said three words and told me to remember them. I recited them to myself, feeling a bit skeptical of my brain’s capacity to hold three words longer than three seconds.
Next, she gave me a piece of paper and pointed to a large blank square. She drew a perfect circle in the square, freehand. We both admired her ability to draw a perfect circle. She said, now put the numbers on the clock and mark the time as 8:20. I put on the numbers and marked the time.
She said, what were those three words?
I said, banana sunrise chair. She said, you passed the test. (You could say I aced it, but I would hardly call that a test.) Anyway, before long, she wrapped up the visit and left, complaining that she had two more visits to do before her day was done. I gave her some empathy, which cost me nothing, and shut the door.
The writer’s group met on Friday. It was a five-words day. I spent the week mulling over what word I would contribute. I wanted something visual but not overtly positive or negative. Not a word that would conjure anything that could steer anyone’s writing in one direction or another. For instance, curmudgeon is a great word but definitely sets a tone. Likewise, abyss. Another great word that conjures up something perhaps better left unexplored.
The word I finally chose was drift.
Here are the five words, followed by what I wrote. No edits. Well, I fixed one typo.
patience
choices
ossuary
drift
angry
I admit, I made a few poor choices last year. I had no patience. In my defense, I was angry. I spent my best years on a riding mower, weaving among the graves, expertly dodging certain headstones, intentionally chipping the corners of others, which takes some skill, let me tell you. I guess I assumed no one would see me desecrating what was supposedly hallowed ground. Hallowed my rosy red rump. The only thing hallowed about that cemetery was the amount of money it generated for the overlords of the hospital next door. Clinic to hospital to nursing home to funeral home and here, to the final resting place, six feet under the lawn I mowed. So what happened? I’m glad you asked. My buddy Mitch ratted on me. The boss called me in. He said, I’ll give you two choices: burial or cremation. I said, what do you mean? He said, coffin or ossuary. I said, what’s an ossuary? I should have chosen coffin. There would have been more room. I’m writing to you from an ugly ceramic jar. It’s very cramped in here, and I think the funeral home dropped in a few cigar ashes when nobody was looking. The boss keeps me on a shelf in the garden shed as a warning to other mowers who drift by.
I should have incorporated drift somewhere else. Like, if you get my drift. It was my own word, and I almost left it out. Oh well. Twenty minutes isn’t really long enough to wordsmith a literary masterpiece.
When it came to read-your-work time, I read a short essay I’d written the previous week. The subject was lawlessness. The first paragraph was predictable. By the second paragraph, it was probably clear I was headed for outer space. I discussed how the breakdown of laws in the U.S. had led to the breakdown of other laws we’d taken for granted, namely, the law of conservation of mass and energy and the law of gravity. I’ll let you imagine the consequences of these two breakdowns.
The third example of lawlessness involved the law of attraction. I think my distaste for vision boards came through loud and clear. One of the writers in the group observed I’d spent too much time in California. I laughed, ha ha, thinking really? That’s what you have to say? Later she slipped me a bit of paper with my name on it and the words phone number? What could I do? Say I didn’t have a phone when my phone was on the table in front of me? I wrote my phone number and gave back the paper.
Did I just make a friend? Time will tell.