Just Call me Job

When I woke up yesterday morning, my leg felt a little itchy. I noticed a few red spots, but since it was 5:30 am, I was not capable of the higher mental functions of curiosity, fear or vanity. I was, however, able use the primal functions contained in my brain stem to drive my handsome boyfriend to the airport for his flight to California. Back at home, a fourth cup of coffee gently lifted my mental fog and allowed me to turn my attention to my increasingly itchy backside.

What had looked like a preschool game of connect-the-dots two hours earlier had morphed into an advanced biology lecture where the professor comments "this is what the subject looked like about 14 seconds before being completely consumed by the Ebola virus." As my fully caffeinated brain reeled, a troubling memory percolated to the surface. Just two days before, a resident in the building where I work had related the horrifying story of her sudden illness the previous weekend, an illness that had involved A TERRIBLE WHOLE BODY RASH. Since I love to pet this resident's adorable dog, there was only one conclusion to draw...I had contracted a deadly human/canine skin disease. I nervously called my doctor.

The receptionist listened to my impassioned plea for assistance and assured me the doctor would call me back as soon as possible. I accepted this lie as gratefully as a terminal Cindy Lou Woo, wanting so desperately to believe in my medi-Kringle. To demonstrate my trust, I called the office back every 20 minutes with updates of my condition until the doctor returned my call. He advised me to SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION at my local hospital.

I hurried right over to the hospital and checked in at the reception desk. Surveying the waiting area, I selected the spot that would put me as far away as possible from any other human being in the room, seating myself somewhere in northern Manitoba. Once seated, I pulled out my cell phone in order to text my last will and testament to my handsome boyfriend but could not get a signal. My only hope for getting a signal was to move to one of the few open seats below a row of dirty skylights.

I considered my options. My choices were to sit next to the the man who periodically coughed and hacked something into his well used handkerchief, the woman who sighed repeatedly, looking around for someone/anyone to tell her tale of woe to or the totally quiet old lady in Jackie O sunglasses with a face-lifted, permanent smile. Since she could have been dead for all I knew, I picked the old lady for a seat mate.

After moving into the chair near her, I discovered that there was life in the old girl yet. She emitted a low, wheezing rasp with each intake of air. As I studied her with my peripheral vision, I suddenly wondered if she would slowly reach up, open her unnaturally wide, plumped lipped mouth, unhinge her jaw and shallow me whole. My thoughts and her death rattle were interrupted by a commotion at the reception desk.

Though the person was around the corner and out of sight, it sounded like they were drunk and trying to explain something to the receptionists. Bitter that I may be missing a somewhat early happy hour at 1 pm, I watched the forced cheerfulness of the receptionists decay into a mixture of discomfort, pity and I-wish-I-was-anywhere-else-but-here. It was then that the trouble maker was gently urged around the corner and into a chair by her caretaker husband. It was painfully obvious that her disability had left her with little idea of where she was, how to form words correctly or the purpose of the facility she was in. I think that is why she tried to ask everyone who hurried by where she was. Her husband smiled at the uncomfortable passers by and said "that's okay, that's okay", trying to put them at ease while patting and rubbing his wife's back, calming her. He would lean in close and speak quietly to her with such gentleness, love and grace that it was breathtaking. I was ill prepared to encounter such a thing of beauty in such a place. Maybe it was my own pain and discomfort, maybe my caffeine levels were getting dangerously low or maybe my Sphinx-like seat mate's wheezing had unnerved me, but I found myself beginning to cry.

I came in with the dreaded human/canine skin disease, which turned out to be nothing more than a reaction to antibiotics, but I had stumbled upon a cure for self pity, and I hoped its effects would be permanent.