The Smell of the Peppermint, the Roar of the Patient

I was quite disappointed Monday when the doctor could not slice open my mom's face. She has been antsy to get this over with. It's not like she's hauling around a football-sized goiter like that old gal who used to date Mohandas. Gandhi. The Mahatma. No, she just wants that smaller-than-a-dime pink scaly dot gone from in front of her left ear.

I, on the other hand, have used up all my comedy bits to distract her in the waiting room. I'm going to have to write some new material for next Wednesday. No. I can't. Because that dastardly Doctor scheduled her to come in on his day off a half hour before MY lab test to look into my lungs for embolisms. So I will not be able to entertain her worries away. I suppose she will be fine. There shouldn't be much of a wait since it's Doctor's day off.

Yes, I was in rare form Monday. I stopped just short of concluding with, "Thank you, I'll be here all week." Because nobody wants to be in the doctor's waiting room all week. As we sat side by side, with a chair in between us holding our purses, in the solitude of the kid/TV waiting area down in the corner that was empty save for us, I speculated on her upcoming procedure.

"I guess he'll have you lay on your side on the exam table. If you don't want to lay down, tell him! Tell him you're not comfortable, and they'll prop you up."

"Yes. They usually ask if I want a pillow."

"Tell him that you're nervous. Maybe he'll give you something. You can be all doped up. I'll drive you home."

"Oh, I don't want to tell him that I'm nervous."

"You know how your blood pressure goes up when you get in the office? Tell him you're nervous. He needs to know. I'll tell him for you as I walk you in."

"You don't have to do that."

"I want him to take care of you. I'll wait until he gives you that shot to deaden your face, then I'll probably come back out. I don't want to sit there. I'll be in the way. And nobody wants an audience when he's carving on a face. I don't want it to be like a Gallagher show. I don't have a plastic raincoat."

"You can stay if you want."

"No. But I wish I'd brought some Junior Mints."

"Why? I have some mints. But they're peppermint. I always bring some for Karen, the nurse. Then I found out that Doctor takes them from her. So the next time, I brought him a bag, too. But today I didn't bring any. I was just here last week."

"Great! The day you're having your skin lesion removed, you forget the peppermints. And now I'm going in with you, and they'll think it's MY fault! I'm not about to have peppermint on my breath."

"I was so glad I'm getting this over with that I forgot. But you want Junior Mints?"

"Haven't you seen Seinfeld? If I had a box of Junior Mints, I could offer one to the doctor as soon as he sliced open your face. Then he might say, 'I don't WANT a Junior Mint!' and knock my hand away. And a Junior Mint could sail through the air and land right in your incision. They have excellent healing properties, I'm told."

"Oh, that's terrible!"

"Yeah. At first they thought a Junior Mint might be the cause of a terrible infection. But don't worry. It was a life-saver!"

"Did you hear that? I only ate my Little Debbie Brownie with my medicine this morning."

"Um. That was somebody coughing like he has diphtheria over there in that other office complex."

"Oh. I thought it was my stomach growling."

"What are you, some kind of stomach ventriloquist? That noise was clearly over there behind that wall. Not right beside me in your stomach."

"That's really embarrassing. I hope no one else heard it."

"Why would you care if they heard some guy cough? It wasn't your stomach."

I think Mom has seen too much of that Jack Links Jerky commercial with the guy in the board meeting and that wolf in his stomach. At that moment, they called Mom in to the inner sanctum. I jumped up to follow.

Let the record show that after our fiasco of a patient/patient/Doctor meeting, Doctor told us we were driving him crazy.

Maybe we should take our show on the road.