Ever since I have known Mark, he’s been afraid of doctors. He gripes about the co-pays, the potential for scary or unwelcome news, having to take time off work, finding the right doctor, buying prescriptions, etc.
Me? I like going to the doctor. It’s like going to the spa. You leave feeling taken care of, like you’ve done something good for your body. I believe in medicine, and I’ve always felt at ease in hospitals. Maybe it’s because my mother is a nurse, and she instilled in me a healthy belief in immediately diagnosing illness, treating it, and moving on. And like most big families, my six brothers and sisters and I turn our health into a competition. The last time I had dinner with five of my brothers and sisters, we begged my Mom to put her fingers on our wrists to figure out who had the lowest pulse rate. (I won! I won!)
Of course, youth helps. Doctors never scold me, I’m usually being praised for my great blood pressure or healthy habits (no caffeine or alcohol). Thank you, thank you, I demure. I leave feeling like the world is at my fingertips, I skip out of the waiting room, shouting in my head “I’m young, I’m healthy I’m vibrant!”
So when I made a routine optometrist appointment to get new contact lenses, I was looking forward to the usual: “Your eyes are perfect, everything looks great, here’s your contact lenses.”
Mark told me he was putting off his own optometrist appointment.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they’re going to tell me I need bifocals,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be a wuss,” I said. “So what? That’s not a big deal.”
My appointment started out routine. She examined my eyes, giving me a few images to read.
“Everything looks great,” she said. I sat smugly in the chair. I felt better already.
She put drops in my eyes to dilate them and left the room.
When she returned, she told me to look ahead, up to the left, to the right.
“Oh, there’s a floater!” she said excitedly. It’s like she was excited to find a flaw.
“What’s a floater?” I asked. It sounded really alarming. A “floater” wasn’t something I wanted in my eye.
“Oh, it’s just your eye breaking apart as you age,” she said.
I stared at her a moment, dumbfounded. “But I’m 26!” I said. “With age?”
It’s perfectly normal, she said.
“You’re lucky that yours is pretty far back. Others are much closer and you can actually see them. They look like little black spots.”
Little black spots?!?!? How had I never heard about this? Thousands, probably millions, of people are walking around, going about their business, with little black spots in their field of vision?
“Also,” she decided to add helpfully, “because you’re near-sighted your retina is more likely to detach. Watch out for lightning streaks.” She raked the air with her fingers. She continued on with a host of other calamities, like glaucoma, that I’m more likely to get in my advanced age.
I stumble out of the eye doctor’s office, wearing those goofy paper sunglasses and squinting in the bright light.
I am not young and vibrant. I am falling apart. I called Mark from my car.
“How was it?” he asked.
“You know what?” I said. “You’re right. Going to the doctor blows.”
Welcome to the club, he said. Welcome to the club.
Postscript: A week later, I woke up with an extremely stiff and sore neck. A rash developed. I could hardly get out of bed, and we were moving into our new house that weekend. I went to the doctor. Shingles, he said. Shingles? I said. That’s for old people. Not so, the doctor said, the chicken pox virus emerges in times of stress. Are you stressed? Was I ever. Two out-of-town work trips, deadlines, a move into a new house, a mortgage, painting rooms, fixing painting mistakes, spending $200 at Lowe’s on who-knows-what. And the worst part? I was getting old. One day at a time.
Mark tells me the good news is that I’ll get used to it.
Eventually.
Confessions of a Newlywed 