I went to the doctor today. The waiting room was the usual stuffy box full of crumpled magazines and sniffling, hacking people. I was trying not to think too much about how I was surrounded by disease vectors when a man sat down next to me and started talking very loudly about flu season and germs.
He told me--and the rest of the room--about the time he was on an elevator with a little kid who was coughing, and sure enough, he felt sick the very next day. He told me about how his son went to the hospital to visit a sick relative and got sick too, from the hospital germs.
He told me about the Reader's Digest article he'd read about how you're not supposed to read magazines at the doctor's office because they're in all likelihood crawling with disease.
At this point, every person in the waiting room glanced down at their magazines, examined their hands, and looked back up at the old man. To be polite, I half-jokingly asked him if he happened to be in a waiting room when he read that article, and he said, "No! That's the point! You're not supposed to read the magazines in the waiting room!"
The Hispanic girl across from me covered up her giggles with a fit of harsh coughing. I couldn't look at her or I'd start in too, so I looked straight ahead. She finished up with a series of sneezes.
After a long silence, the old man told me--and the whole room--about his grandmother, who was a doctor and had done her rounds on horseback during the flu epidemic in 1918. And one time, years later, an old Mexican man came up to him and thanked him because his grandmother had saved his entire family, both parents and all 16 children.
"He came up to me and said 'I want thank you much. Thank much. Your grandmother, she save. Jes, she save whole family.'"
It was an embarrassing performance, especially since his approximation of the man's accent sounded more like Tonto than anything else. The girl across from me was laughing so hard she had to bury her whole face in her (germ-riddled) magazine while everyone else in the waiting room sank their heads into their hands.
Still, the man didn't stop. "My grandmother was a doctor, but I'd never want to be one. I'd hate to be a doctor. All that disease, working with sick people inside those closed-up rooms, those airless warrens of germy--"
Then, to my vast relief, the nurse called my name, and I got up and told the man to have a nice day. He smiled sweetly and said, "Bye-bye."
Then I went in and whined for a while and walked out with a prescription for Ambien, which I hope will help get me to sleep before 7 a.m. Really, the world is weird enough without being sleep deprived all the time.