After not feeling well for a few weeks – some sort of flu, I suppose – my wife drags me to the doctor after work one evening, where the nurse pokes and prods me, reading my blood pressure, taking my temperature, and all.
“Do you know your weight?” the nurse asks, likely noting that based on my sitting here in my wheelchair, I clearly can’t stand on the office’s scale.
“479-pounds,” I reply. “I weighed myself today.”
“479-pounds?” the nurse asks, looking me in the eyes.
“That’s right,” I say, following with a cough, watching the nurse write in my chart.
“The doctor will be in shortly,” the nurse says, dropping my chart in a basket on the door as she leaves.
I’m glad that my wife didn’t come into the exam room with me because she proves an overbearing nightmare, not only asking way too many questions of the doctor about my health, but generally putting a damper on my fun. As such, I roll over to the sink, and open the cabinet underneath, and it’s a mother lode of soft goods – rubber gloves, cotton balls, tissues, and disposable gowns. But, what really catches my attention are the giant cotton swabs that must be a foot long. What, do they with these, clean the ears of elephants? I pull one out and look at it, unable to resist dropping it in my backpack to tease my daughter with it when I get home. I look for other complimentary gifts, but nothing interests me, so I shut the cabinet door, and read the prescription medication advertising posters on the wall.
“Hey, Mark, what’s going on today?” the doctor asks, swinging in through the doorway, pulling up her stool, her perfume immediately filling the air over the sterile, paper smell coming from the examination table beside me.
“I’m a little under the weather,” I say. “…Cough, fever, the whole marvelous gig.”
“Let’s see here,” she says, opening my chart. “You show a fever of 100.5 – that’s not good. Oh, and look, you weigh 479-pounds.”
“Actually, I’ve lost 3-pounds,” I say. “I was 482.”
“And, how exactly are you weighing yourself?” she asks, flashing a sarcastic smile.
“On a scale,” I say.
“In your wheelchair?” she asks.
“How’d you guess?” I ask.
“Because you tried this on me before,” she says,
“I must be slipping because I’m sick,” I say with a chuckle. “Every month or so I weigh myself on our giant scale at work to see if my powerchair’s eating too much chocolate.”
“How much does your wheelchair weigh?” she asks, putting her pen to paper.
“About 340,” I say, and she does the math by hand.
“So, that means you’re 139,” she says.
“I guess that’s why you’re the doctor and I’m the patient,” I say.
“I guess that’s why your wife should be in here making you behave,” she says.
“Why – so you can both ruin my fun?” I say, and she laughs, reaching for her stethoscope.
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