I’d been feeling very weak, flu like almost. Hungry, but nauseas at the thought of food, so I went to the doctor. Of course, I don’t have insurance at the moment, so I had to go to a free clinic. I should have known something was up or wrong with this place because they advertised on tv like some bad lawyer. They described my symptoms exactly and said I could qualify for government assistance because of flouride in the water or some lame shit like that.
So I go and they take some blood and the ordinary vitals and after waiting for a couple of hours I’m shown into this back room to the doctors office. I walk in and I shit you not, the old white haired motherfucker is smoking a cigarette. Not an e cig, but a goddammed camel unfiltered. He’s got a pile of them in an ashtray that should have been emptied during the vietnam era. When I walk in, he looks a little too excited to see me and puts out his cigarette, waving the smoke away.
Sit, Sit he says a nurse guides me to an old pleather chair.
He picks up a folder, opens it and reads something that must have been pretty interesting.
Yes, Yes, he says to himself.
SO, he says to me. You were bitten by a Tod or a Vixen?
Well, it was a Vixen? I said, but I wasn’t truly bit. I had a condom on.
Of course, he said. But the test results, they don’t lie. You’ve got the deadabetes.
He then slaps himself and laughs as if he just made up this joke. Has anyone, ever, in the history of doctor patient relations, ever thought it was funny when a medical professional made a joke about your terminal illness?
Fuck no.
That’s why I said, I should have known something. But I felt like shit, so I stayed. And I listened. And I took the phone number he gave me. Said, I could get some special, experimental medicine and they would actually pay me to take it. I should have known, I should have had a little more what do they call it “french word for foresight” that you never get a fee lunch. Escpecially when the most important question to him wasn’t my sypmtoms, but the fact I had very little family alive. My mom was alive, but she was looney, so that seemed to make it all the better.
I took the prescription and left. As I was leaving, some other sucker, looking far worse than I did bumped into me on his way in. He asked me if this was the place from the commercials? It still haunts me that I didn’t lie and tell him the place was closed down.