A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

A Visit to the Doctor

59 A Visit to the Doctor There was an ashtray on the desk in Dr. Day’s examining room, a shallow brass dish with birds’ heads, ibises or storks or something, their necks arched, the birds facing in opposite directions with beaks open so Dr. Day could wedge his Lucky Strike cigarette laterally across the bird’s beak and let the bird hold it while he held a five-by-seven note card from your file with both hands and thought about you and whatever it was that had you perched up there on the examining table in the cloud of smoke behind him. He was a bullet-headed, barrel-bodied little man in a Ben Casey smock that day in the autumn of 1962, almost fifty, a physician and surgeon out of one of the big land-grant schools down in Kansas. His crew cut undulated over and through rolls of fat on the back of his neck. Fat sagged, too, from the sides of his rib cage, down and out across the saddle of his lower back. The Eisenhower years had been good. Beef and potatoes every evening , and no doubt a toddy or two, had given the man the shape of a pear. The Luckies were beginning to exact their toll. He had to pull a bit harder when he picked one out of a bird’s beak and puffed. Every breath whistled on the way in, rolled around down there without much traction, and came out with a short, heavy, rheumy plop, as if someone had dropped a sack of wet sand on the floor from hip height. 60 A V ISIT TO THE DOCTOR His smock was light green and rayon—a color and texture that made you think of radium. What a coincidence. The X-rays (two of them) of my right knee clamped onto the light box on the wall to his left had me thinking of radium, too. The entire trip to Dr. Day’s office set off some sort of internal Geiger counter that measured anxiety, and it was reaching dangerous levels in the cramped little room. My pants were figure-eighted around my ankles. A towel sagged across my lap. My father, smoking too, was in the room, sitting on a straight chair beside Dr. Day’s desk. My father never took us to the doctor unless it was something serious, and here he was, trying to keep the mood light. Dr. Day didn’t seem to have a light mood. Not in the office. You had the idea he might enjoy a few cocktails and lead the Saturday night country club conga line now and then, but Monday through Friday, in and around medical matters, the man functioned at a low, steady, scienti fic drone. The Geiger counter ratcheted up a bit more. Dr. Day hung his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, turned from his notes, and squinted through the smoke at the X-rays again. He tapped a blurry white-and-dark space behind the kneecap. “Water on the knee,” he said, the tone of his voice curt, full of that authority people afforded doctors and clergymen in those days. “Torn meniscus. Going to drain it, immobilize it, and see what happens.” He pressed a button to call the nurse. “Football hero,” my father said for Dr. Day’s benefit. “Season’s over, Sport,” Dr. Day said to me over his shoulder. He lit a new Lucky from the butt of the old one, spun around, and patted me on the knee. “This might hurt a little.” The nurse knocked on the door and stuck her head in. She looked frumpy and competent, like Hazel the maid in the Saturday Evening Post cartoon series. “Yes, doctor?” “Gonna drain this knee,” Dr. Day said to her. “Set me up.” A V ISIT TO THE DOCTOR 61 “Yes, doctor.” She went to a radium-green cabinet on the wall beside my father and took out a stainless steel tray and a small stainless steel bowl. She set the tray on the small counter beneath the cabinet , laid a white cotton towel on it, put the bowl on the towel, then opened the drawer and pulled out a big syringe. A very big syringe. She closed the drawer and opened the one immediately below it. There was a row of needles on a white...