"Mark, wake up.  I need some more Nyquil."

 

    Reluctantly, I slipped out from under the warm comforter and poured a dose of the cherry-flavored medicine.  My wife is completely disabled and accordingly, I'm obligated to do these things for her.  Hours passed and I drifted to slumberville again until I felt the hand on my hip.

 

    "Mark, wake up.  I need ginger ale."

 

    The ginger ale failed as a cure as well, and near dawn she offered to go in the living room and try to rest in her easy chair so at least I could get some sleep.  I was naked and cold when I transferred her to her wheelchair and wheeled her into the living room.  Back in the bed, I could still hear the relentless cough.  Nevertheless, I concentrated on getting restorative sleep and had a few vague dreams involving beef gravy and a mysterious woman in the fog outside the front window of my house.  Sleep didn't last long because my wife's cough sounded terrible, worse then before, a bronchitis-like sound, and I could actually picture the swollen alveolis in her lungs as if I was looking at an illustration on WebMD.  I watch too many episodes of Untold Stories of the ER, and I began imagining a worst case scenario of sudden pneumonia.  I couldn't sleep any longer despite accumulating maybe fifteen hours in the past four days which is probably more than double what my wife had gotten.

 

    The decision was made:  that day we would drop my daughter off at my mom's house and look for a clinic in the hopes we could find a doctor who would prescribe some medicine that would work, unlike the worthless quackery found over the counter.

 

    It was a sunny day, and I didn't feel like driving, but there I was traversing the bumper-to-bumper mess of overdeveloped suburbia.  We found the clinic closest to my mom's house, only it was more like a private doctor's office in a complex directly behind a bank.  The office was a modern, expensive piece of real estate, and made out of brick like a residential house, but the sign said, "walk-ins welcome."  I took my wife's wheelchair out of the trunk (it's the kind that breaks apart for easy storage) and noticed cat manure on the side of the wheel.  It was one of those days.  I wiped off what I could with an old sock that happened to be in the trunk and conscientiously put the sock back in the trunk.

 

    I rolled my wife in the office.

 

    The receptionist said, "we don't take patients with Medicare."

 

    I rolled my wife back out.

 

    That doctor disgusts me.  His policy proves he cares more about money than helping people.  The proximity of his office to the bank is obviously no coincidence.  A rage, though delayed by my condition of insomnia, began building.  Some people have accused me of being mentally unbalanced.  I disagree, but I gave fodder to their blither--I took the manure-smeared sock and rubbed it on the doctor's nameplate which was on a fancy stone sign in front of his office.  If I ever met him in person, I'd tell him what kind of a wicked, money-grubbing jerk he is.  Luckily, I didn't see him that day because my sleep-deprived mood could have easily moved me to violence, and I would have felt justified punishing a businessman posing as a healer.

 

    We drove back to my mom's house, and my father, a retired physician, gave us a prescription.  He used to make housecalls for five bucks, and he never turned away people who couldn't pay him.  Compare him to the doctor who refused to see us; not because we couldn't pay him, but because the insurance didn't pay him soon enough or involved aggravating paperwork.  My father doesn't have a high opinion of other doctors in general.  His motto is: Stay away from doctors--meaning they tend to do more harm than good.

 

    The medicine my father prescribed for my wife worked.  We slept that night and woke up refreshed with the feeling that life is wonderful again.  But I still feel like kicking that doctor's butt.

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About the author Mark Gelbart: My book, Talk Radio, is a black comedy about a radio talk show host who gets kidnapped and psychologically tortured by a loser.



www.mark-gelbart.com

Email: agelbart@aol.com

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