Ridgway Blues - Installment #3

Sitting in a crowded Acute Care waiting room, Charlie squirms in the wheelchair as he listens for his name to be called. “Forget this, let's just leave and make an appointment.”

“No, goddammit,” Kay responds. “After 35 years of marriage, I know when something is wrong with you.”

“Oh, bullshit. It's just a back strain. They will do what they've done for the past year and send me home with muscle relaxers and pain meds and tell me to lay off the golf.”

“Well, that's going to be unacceptable this time, because there's more to it than a strained back.”

The clock on the wall now reads 4:00 pm. Charlie is slumped over in the wheelchair, with barely enough strength to hold his head upright. Kay is reading a magazine while dangling a shoe from the end of her left foot. She continually looks up at the clock. A door opens, and a nurse, dressed in colorful scrubs and holding a chart, emerges.

She calls out, “Dr. Drummand?”

Leaping from her seat, Kay screams, “Right here!”

Kay wheels Charlie into a small examining room.

“The doctor will be right with you.” The nurse closes the door.

“I fucking bet,” Charlie quips. Just then there is a rap on the door, and it opens revealing a fat, slovenly female doctor. She enters the small room and has difficulty positioning her fat ass on the stool reserved for the doctor.

Sarcastically, she asks, “So, what seems to be the emergency?”

Kay chimes in, “If you lived with this man over the past two weeks, you would know what the emergency was.”

Rolling her eyes, the doctor says, “Uh-uh.” Turning toward Charlie, she asks, “So, you've strained your back?”

Charlie has run out of patience, “Well, if I knew that, I sure as hell wouldn't be here. Yes, my back hurts, but I've also recently developed these knots under the skin on my right shoulder.”

“Well, I don't think that's anything to worry about. I'll give you some pain meds and have you schedule a follow-up visit with your regular doctor in a couple of weeks.”

Kay slams her hand down on the small desk in front of the blue vinyl stool the doctor is sitting on. “Bullshit you will! I'm no doctor, but I know damned good and well knots like that aren't fucking normal.”

“There is no need for such language, Mrs. … ” she looks down at the patient file in her hand … “Drummand. But if it will make you feel better, I'll schedule a biopsy for some time next week.”

Kay replies, “You do that.”

The doctor makes some notes in the file and quickly departs the examining room. The nurse comes into the room.

“Nurse, could you please wheel my husband back to the reception area after he has been checked out? I have to run upstairs.”

“Sure, I'd be happy to.”

“Where are you going?” Charlie asks.

“I'm going to find Dr. Lawrence. I don't trust that bitch. In fact, I wouldn't take my dying cat to see her. You are going to see a real doctor!”

Kay leaves the acute care examining room with a clear sense of purpose. She steps off the elevator and rushes toward the door at the end of the long sterile hallway she had just come from hours earlier. She barges into the reception area and slams her hand on the receptionist's counter.

Pleading, Kay says, “My husband has got to see Dr. Lawrence.”

A woman in white slacks and a colorful smock of spring flowers is looking at a patient's file and turns toward the receptionist’s desk when she hears Kay's voice. She approaches the receptionist counter and asks, “Kay, what's the matter?”

“Oh, Mary, thank God! Charlie's downstairs and just saw the most incompetent doctor on the face of the planet. Something is wrong with him, terribly wrong. He has to see Dr. Lawrence today. Please, please won't you help me?”

“Calm down, Kay, everything will be okay. Where's Charlie now?”

“He's still downstairs.”

“You go get him and come back here, and I'll try to catch the doctor before he leaves. He has a conference tonight at 5:30 and is the keynote speaker, so it's going to be cutting it close.”

Kay makes a mad dash to the door. She emerges from the elevator into the now deserted acute care waiting room. Hunched in a wheelchair in the corner is Charlie. He weakly raises his hand and holds out a script for yet another pain medication.

Charlie holds up the script. “We need to get this filled on our way home.”

Kay grabs the piece of paper from Charlie's hand, wads it into a ball, and throws it on the floor.

“Fuck that! You're going back upstairs to see Dr. Lawrence.”