I was at the orthopedic pediatrician’s office. I was 17. Getting my crooked, curly spine checked out at my appointment for scoliosis management.
The receptionist moved about the office. Tampering with walls of paper files.
In idleness, her screensaver clicked on. 187 days till Disney World floated across the screen in a chasing pattern.
I didn’t wanna be there. This screensaver was a pretty clear tell that she didn’t either.
Today I’d be seeing a doctor who, when I was 12, asked me if I had “ever looked in the mirror and wished to be a little thinner?” I was so stung at this remark, I couldn’t speak. I nodded dumbly. I didn’t tell him, it was all I wished. To be thinner. 80 percent of my energy was spent thinking, I wanna be thinner. But always my will would collapse and cave. My hunger would claw back. It had been this way for years.
His argument, in the medical dark ages of 1998, was that my scoliosis brace (which I was prescribed to wear 23 hours a day, but in practice wore more like 17 hours a day because I’d take it off for dance classes, which were nearly every day) would work better if I was just a little thinner, if I could only swing that.
In my deepest embodied wisdom, I knew this couldn’t be true, that my spine would somehow yield to pressure placed against it and would do this extra handily if I “next time, skipped that extra piece of cake,” as this doctor creatively wagered, aloud. I think I made a sound, maybe a stunned grunt. A strained attempt to express my innocence, which I felt adults so valued, to say, “No, gee, I had never considered it.” I am only 12 and never think of my body one way or another — was the answer I felt adults expected, having somehow never been hostages to puberty themselves.
At 17, I was back to see this same old man for a follow-up. The type of old man in medicine who gives old men in medicine their tarnished reputation. Of the ilk who, in a professional setting, call chronic UTI’s “honeymooner’s cystitis” and, saying this, chuckle at some inane memory of their wife at 22, whom you’re sure never spoke a word of her actual suffering to the likes of him. There is a whole fleet of this flavor of “healthcare provider” and they all, first, do harm. Many of them are dead now, but when they were, too recently, active, it was their custom to find young women and their maladies to be quaint, enigmatic, charming, and unstudied, therefore, unserious.
Listlessly, dreading my appointment, I point to the screen as the receptionist settles into my file.
“You’re going to Disney World?” I ask her.
The rotund receptionist gives a half smile as she pulls out a loose leaf page that she will fax somewhere on my behalf.
“Yup. In,” checks her chasing screensaver, “187 days.”
“Cool. That will be fun,” I say.
And buffeted as I am by intrusive thoughts, I think of her nowadays. At utterly random moments. Random to my conscious mind, but probably very not random to the gears of my subconscious, which must always know where sad, stuck memories hail from and when and why they do.
There she sits, ad infinitum, at Hartford Children’s Hospital. Opening my file. Over and over. An imprisoned animatronic relic, ensconced by the pillows of her own generous rump. Wishing her wretched year away. Every day closer, counting down, to Disney World.
When I look back on her, in her bulging scrubs covered in Care Bears, I would like to kidnap her from that stultifying office, drag her fat ass away to Disney World and scream at her, once we’ve fled to safety, slapping her demoralized, doughy face as we stand on the whooshing tarmac at the busy airport: DO NOT WASTE 187 DAYS WAITING TO LIVE. EAT ALL THE CAKE IN DISNEY WORLD NOW AND LEAVE HIM THERE, YOUR TERRIBLE DOCTOR BOSS, TO STARVE.
My last appointment before I leave for college.
I pray that she made it to Disney World and I long for her to have had a really, really fun and liberating time there.
Oh my! I have had some spinal memories similar to these. As always, beautiful writing.
Great writing again, Emma, but what a shame to have to confront such cringe-worthy memories.