“Doctor, Doctor”


When you rise in the morning and suddenly collapse back into your bed with enough restriction of the lungs to make you woozy, the inability to hear your mother pounding on the door to save you from being late yet again, and the failure to have enough energy to turn off your alarm clock that has been buzzing for the last 16 and a half minutes, you know where you’re bound to end up. Wearing the old flannel pajama bottoms and two 5 pound winter coats to keep the chills away, you (with difficulty), open the doors leading to “the office.” Signing your name on the check in sheet feels like bestowing away your soul to tests, x-rays, measurements, and the inquisitive propositions of the doctor. Sinking into a chair that appears comfortable, (but actually isn’t), you wait restlessly for 15 minutes for the nurse in her baby blue scrubs, a neon clipboard, and a pen with some sort of irrelevant medication name on it. After you are commanded to step on, stand up here, go this way, take this, go there, and sit down, you wait more for the ultimate battle. He strolls in, and glances around the room. Everything is always there: the cotton balls that they never utilize, the popsicle sticks that never remind you of a summer treat, the container on the wall of used needles, the window that shows nothing but the roof with dead birds, and finally, the table they ask you to sit on. After the poking, the prodding, and the million of inquiries they ask you (which all are followed with a monotone, “hmm…”), you are finally passed a sheet of paper with a 15 letter long chemical that you couldn’t understand if the constitution commanded you to, and a signature that a preschooler could flawlessly forge.

While the majority of the human race despises any form of medicine that could potentially waste their time while they could be at home watching Soap Operas and popping their Day-Quil and Sudafed, I rejoice in the knowledge of a doctor and his office. I sit in the examination room, counting the number of hot air balloons on the wallpaper, studying the diagram of my nervous system, marveling at the way everything was structured so perfectly. These doctors had worked a minimum of eight years to have an office like the one I was sitting in, and the facts that they spit at me made me feel like a child who longed to be able to read their bedtime story for themselves. It was the way these men and woman could heal the way that decades ago was believed that only gods and their descendants could. Yes, doctor’s offices were a place of disease, frustration, and disappointment, but don’t dare to neglect the way that doctors also give a cure, options, and hope. Whether you feel the necessity to reassure yourself that you are in fact alive, you have a minor cold, or just waiting for a loved one to retreat back to the waiting room with a sense of reprieve in their eyes, doctors and their squeaky red stools, magazines from years ago that no one ever actually reads, and irritated receptionists know more about you than you do.

This ironic comfort of an examination room that makes waking up in the morning with a throat that cuts like glass and hands that shake like a terrified animal worthwhile because I know that once I’m down, the only place I can go, is up.


This will certify that the above work is completely original.
Madeline Swanson