It Looked Different on the Model by Laurie Notaro
I really didn’t want to go to the doctor. I really, really didn’t. I would very nearly rather stay home and take my chances with major muscle spasms and communicate by typing with a straw in my mouth than go to the doctor. If I had a doctor who would figure out the issue, write me a prescription for whatever ails me, and let me be on my way, that would be one thing. But I don’t have that kind. I have the kind who is one of those “above and beyond” physicians, one who wants you to get a little something extra for your co-pay, whether it be some extra facts to put in your cap, a field trip, or a recipe for bran muffins. I guess it could be considered “going the extra mile,” but I don’t see how that’s a benefit when I’m the one who’s running it.
I suppose putting out even a bit of extra effort these days is all very nice, but when I came down with an intestinal malady that I knew I needed medical attention for, I just needed a quick visit, a prescription for Cipro, and to go back to bed. And, in fact, he didn’t write me one prescription, he wrote me two, and told me I needed to go down to the first-floor library to fill them. And then he gave me a recipe for bran muffins, copies of which he keeps in an organizer on his wall, something he had given me on each previous trip for a flu shot, a swollen knee, and eczema.
“Make some muffins! Your bowel movements should have the consistency of a—” he started.
“Ri—” I joined in.
“—iiiipe banana!” he finished.
So, being the rube that I am, I actually found the library, which was oddly not even in the medical facility but off to the left in an outbuilding. I opened the door to flickering fluorescent lights and an otherwise empty storefront filled with bookshelves and tables; it looked more like a used bookstore than a library. I heard some noises from the back, and out from the shadows came a hunched-over figure shuffling toward me. I almost whispered, “Pop Pop?” except that he didn’t have any coupons in his hand.
An elderly, very tall man emerged from the darkness. I handed him my prescription and he nodded his head, smiled, and seemed to get very excited. I still had no idea how a library was going to give me pills, but it all seemed to make sense to him, so I rolled with it, and when he told me to follow him, off I went to a corner.
He offered me a seat at a table and I took it. Then he started bringing me books, putting them on the table, and going back and getting more. Finally, he took the seat next to me, dragged a heavy book off the top of the stack, and opened it, with the words, “So this is what diseased intestines look like!”
For the next hour, I looked at picture after picture—some illustrations with transparent layers, some photographs of diseased, cancerous, and pouchy intestines—and the old man, who turned out to be a retired doctor who most likely hadn’t seen anybody in the “library” in a number of years, was very happy to see me. It was like he was poring over a yearbook and showing me evidence of his glory days. To be honest, he was having such a good time I couldn’t bear to stop him and responded with fictitious amounts of glee when I saw a big, punchy tumor in a colon and pockets of diverticuli dotting some poor guy’s bowel.
I guess you could say we bonded a little as I looked through all of the old books with him, trying to think of interesting questions like “So can a tapeworm really poke its head out of your butt?” and “Is it possible to stick a can of hairspray up there, or was my best friend’s doctor ex-husband lying about that, too?” and “Do you remember seeing anything at Harvard that looked like a Fart Chart? Officially?”
Now, I wouldn’t say that it was the worst hour I ever spent in my life, but being a polite hostage to a lonely old man exploring the mysteries of the poop chute is not at the top of the list of things I’d like to repeat. In addition, the only “prescription” he could fill was disturbing images found in crusty old books, and I still had to go to Safeway and stand in line behind contagious people anyway. And this was in the forefront of my mind the next time I needed medical treatment, when my tongue turned green and I was convinced it was rotting from gangrene, or most likely from simple overtime. I was panicked and took the first available appointment the following day.
And that took a lot of will. Not just because the last time I visited my doctor I was sent as a sacrificial lamb to the medical library, which I would say somewhat shattered my trust in prescriptions—I mean, this time I got an old doctor when I was expecting a nice, easy painkiller; next time I might think I’m getting my high-blood-pressure pills but get a life coach wearing tie-dye instead—but because I had already suffered mouth indignities and I wasn’t eager to repeat them. I had been to the dentist twice the previous week concerning a new crown I had installed (since they cost as much as appliances and I am going to start referring to them in the same manner) after the tortilla chip incident. My dentist also thought it would be a great idea to cast a mold of my mouth for a teeth-whitening tray, a procedure that took five of the most paralyzing minutes of my life and caused me to apologize aloud for my Mach 4 gag reflexes. I was so tired of people sticking their hands in my piehole that when a basket of bread sticks was placed on our table one night when we went out to dinner, my hand immediately flew up to cover my mouth and my shoulders began rolling.
So while I wasn’t that thrilled with submitting myself to another oral exam, the green-tongue thing was really freaking me out. It had begun to transform several days earlier, showing hints of a lime sort of color; the next day it dove into a deeper colorway of olive; and by the third day, when hints of brown began to appear, I picked up the phone. I brushed my tongue, I gargled with mouthwash, I rinsed with salt water and peroxide. The color kept sliding deeper into the hues of decay and decomposition, and I was afraid to let it go any longer. Actually, I was terrified that I would be talking and my tongue would flip out of my mouth and land at my feet like a dead fish.
Imagine my irritation when the first thing my doctor said after I opened my mouth and showed him my dirt patch of a tongue was, “Hmm. Show that to your grandmother.”
“What?” I asked after he removed the tongue depressor.
“Show that tongue to your grandmother,” he said. “Ask her what a Hairy Tongue is. It used to be quite common.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, even more horrified than I was when I thought my tongue was rotting.
“Means you’ve got a Hairy Tongue,” was his reply. “It’ll go away, just wait.”
“I don’t want to wait,” I replied, and stuck out my tongue again. “Burn it off. Tell me you have a torch in here.”
“Do you eat enough fiber?” he asked.
“Yes,” I assured him.
“What are your bowel movements like?” he continued. “They should be like a ri—”
“Ripe banana,” I finished.
“Here’s a recipe for some bran muffins,” he said, plucking it out of the organizer on the wall. “Get ripe.”
On the way home I contemplated whether I could seriously live with this Hairy Tongue in my mouth or if I should try to look into prosthetics. I didn’t want it in my mouth. I still didn’t know what it was, how I got it, or when it was going to go away.
I was upset about it all day, and I didn’t know how I wasn’t going to chew it off in my sleep at night. I looked at it again before I went to bed and brushed my teeth and was just repulsed. I couldn’t sleep with that brown slug in my mouth. Here I was, trying to make my old smoker’s teeth whiter, and now to have this filthy rug in the middle of them.
And that’s when the lightbulb went on.
The next day, I waited patiently, patiently, patiently, and as soon as the clock struck 9:00 A.M., I picked up the phone and dialed.
“Dr. O’Hara’s office,” the receptionist said.
“Hi, this is Laurie; I was in there just recently,” I explained. “I got a crown, and when Dr. O’Hara was trying to match the crown color to the rest of my teeth, he brought out that little ring of teeth-tint samples and I asked if they were all from dead people?”
“Okay …” the receptionist s
“I’m a gagger?” I added. “Like, relentless gagging when the mold tray was in my mouth?”
“Oh,” the receptionist said. “Laurie Notaro. How can I help you?”
“Will the teeth whitener turn my tongue snail colors? Like from lime to olive to brown?” I asked.
“Sure,” I was told. “If it can change the color of your teeth, it can change the color of your tongue, especially if you’re using the tray overnight.”
Now, I don’t blame the doctor for not knowing that my Hairy Tongue wasn’t hairy after all but that I was turning it the colors of death because of the chemicals I was putting on my teeth. But he did scare the shit out of me, and when I asked Nana what a Hairy Tongue was, all she said was, “That sounds disgusting and I have no idea what that is. Don’t use my bathroom the next time you come here.”
So when I broke my toe smacking it against the cast-iron back bar of my elliptical machine, I rolled around in pain with a purple little piggy that got swollen so bad I could only wear slippers.
And I stayed home and practiced prairie medicine, which would be to frame the situation as “You live alone on the prairie with your ma, pa, and two sisters, and you have broken your toe. What do you do?” And the answer is almost always “Will a bran muffin make that better? Then leave it alone.”
Now, I can’t say that I was thinking that as I was walking back from the bathroom to the bedroom in the middle of the night and catastrophe struck. I was almost back in bed and was standing alongside it when I stepped on Barnaby, my geriatric cat, who by this time was too old to jump up onto the bed and slept on the floor in a pile of my clothes that I was too lazy to hang up. It is well documented that the cat and I had an adversarial relationship, particularly concerning chocolate stars, but not really to the point that I wanted to snap his spine in half like a twig. I knew for a fact that I stepped on him and was terrified I had horribly hurt him, but I had my earplugs in and couldn’t hear if he had screeched or not.
Without pause, I reached down to see if he was okay, but just like that, I felt a terrific blow to my face, and my head jerked back. I fell forward onto the bed, both hands covering my nose as I entered the most primitive state I have ever known (including Ambien) and began emitting deep guttural noises that I couldn’t control, let alone stop. Suddenly a hand was on my back, pulling me up, and I opened my eyes to see my husband’s terrified expression, which was anything but reassuring. Quickly, I realized that I had not been at the side of the bed but at the foot of it, and in the dark and half asleep, I had smacked the underside of my nose directly on the edge of the footboard.
Blood had already begun to seep through my fingers when my husband pulled my hands away from my face and gave me a towel.
“We need to go to the hospital,” he tried to say calmly. “I think you should put your pants on.”
I shook my head.
“Yes, we need to go,” he insisted. “We need to have a doctor look at your nose. I think it’s broken.”
“No it’s not,” I gasped. “It’s fine.”
The last thing I needed was someone touching my frigging nose. No way anyone was getting near it. Even to have someone look at it would hurt. It was like I’d been hit with a two-by-four in the facenuts, if such a hideous, horrible thing existed. I just wanted to lie down and have the pain dribble out of me.
“It sounded like the crack of a baseball bat,” he said.
“It’s not broken,” I mumbled again.
“It sounded like a hatchet chopping into a tree,” he continued, making me more and more unlikely to agree to put pants on.
“You can’t make me put pants on,” I said firmly. “And if you’re foolish enough to try, you should know that my toenails are extra long right now.”
He backed off like an attentive husband should and left me alone. I curled into a ball while my nose bled, sure that when I woke up in the morning I was going to look like a proboscis monkey with a facewiener, or—for less of a Nat Geo and more of an E! reference—Owen Wilson, and I was going to have two huge black eyes.
But the next morning my eyes were fine and my nose hadn’t swollen up, proof that I hadn’t broken it. I didn’t need X-rays or some resident sticking a hand on either side of my head trying to show off. I couldn’t breathe out of it or touch it, but my nose looked fine, despite my husband’s prodding again that I needed to go to the doctor.
“A bran muffin isn’t going to make this any better,” I reminded him. “Prairie medicine. Besides, it’s not broken. No black eyes.”
“If you sneezed, would you pass out?” he asked me.
“No,” I said truthfully. “But it would kill me.”
My nose wasn’t broken. I knew it wasn’t. It was just bruised inside, I told myself, and that’s why I couldn’t touch it for two months. But one day, months later, when I was checking out my teenage-boy mustache in the mirror from different angles, I got a good look at my nostrils. My once perfectly symmetrical nostrils—and, yes, I know it’s a little odd to boast about your perfect nostrils, but they were the only pair of anything that matched on my body and would make me the optimum model for a nasal-spray ad—were no longer mirror images of each other. Not only were they no longer twins and my Plan B as nostril model was dashed, but they were even off center, and the right one was all squished as if it was Stevie Nicks’s when it collapsed under the weight of an eight ball.
So it appears that my nose was indeed broken, but when you step on a cat—who was absolutely fine, by the way—you can never predict what’s going to happen. Your cat could deglove your leg with one swipe, or he could disfigure your nostrils forever. And I thought if I could suffer through that and just have a weird nostril, prairie medicine was my new MO. The results, after all, were the same as going to the doctor, and I never had to put pants on. I felt the whole experience was economical, convenient, and showed traits self-sufficient, even if my mortality rate had skyrocketed.
But with blood pumping out of my foot from the stab wound with the scissor, I knew my prairie-medicine streak had ended. Tetanus was too big of a foe to chance, although the thought of spider-walking in front of my mother in a nightgown held irresistible appeal.
In the waiting room at the doctor’s office, the nurse came out and called my name. I got up and walked toward her with a slight limp, ready to get my bran-muffin recipe.
I felt ripe.
It’s a Bomb
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” my mother said over the phone when I informed her of what time my flight would land in Phoenix. “That’s the same time we’re going out to dinner. And this place is nowhere near the airport.”
I hadn’t seen my family in six months, since Christmas. And while I didn’t exactly expect a ticker-tape parade to erupt at my arrival, I also didn’t expect that I’d be taking a cab ride that cost more than my plane ticket to my parents’ house, simply to sit on the steps in 110 degrees like a yellowed newspaper and wait for them to come home.
“Call your sister; maybe she can pick you up,” my mother said. “This restaurant was on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dumps, you know that show? It’s an Italian place, but the guy with the white hair said it was good. He drives around to all kinds of crappy places and eats there, so he should know. We can’t change it. It’s too late. I already made the reservation.”
“For when?” I asked a little angrily.
“Well, I was just about to call them,” she replied.
In my mother’s defense, it was her birthday. She had a right to go anywhere she wanted to go. In my defense, I was flying in to surprise her for said birthday, a monthlong plan that went suddenly awry when she had apparently not really made reservations at the same time my flight landed and my father, who was in on my conspiracy, put her on the phone to tell me.
“I’m sorry,” my dad said when my mother gave the phone back to him. “Blame the chunk with the albino head. She saw veal parmigiana on television last night, and frankly, there is no stopping it
But that’s my family for you. My grandfather spent two years in France and Belgium as a medic in an army hospital in World War II, and when he finally came home—after marching across several entire countries, trying to save lives of soldiers, sailing back across the ocean on the Queen Mary, and taking a cab to Brooklyn after the ship docked—he found the house empty. My Nana and my mother, whom my Pop Pop hadn’t seen since she was a couple of months old, simply weren’t there.
“It was dinnertime,” my Nana explained sixty years later as she shrugged. “My father called and said supper was on the table. What was I supposed to do? Everyone was waiting for me. Pop Pop was late!”
It goes to show that in the genome of my family, nothing can fight against the lure of tomato sauce and melted cheese; the mere presence or mention of food has Jupiter’s gravitational pull and cannot be stymied. Not even a prodigal patriarch—after helping stop the Nazis from world domination, thus rescuing humanity from having black cheese infested with mites on every menu and reclassifying “cutlets” as “schnitzel”—could be considered if he came home fifteen minutes late from the war. So I guess I should have been happy that I was just flying in from Oregon to meet an empty house and not arriving after battling dictatorships and triumphing over relentless evil, only to discover that if I had to go head-to-head against a meatball, I didn’t have a shot.
My sister, it turns out, was more than happy to pick me up, even before she ate, bucking centuries of tradition and her very own primal instinct.
“How do you deal with staying back home?” she said point-blank as soon as I got into the car. “I had to go over there yesterday to pick the kids up and I only lasted eight minutes. Mom didn’t know how to send an email attachment, so I showed her, went through the steps several times, and she still didn’t get it. Finally I said, ‘Don’t you see the paper clip? The paper clip will tell you that you attached a document.’ ”