fourteen days after Sarah coughed in front of me, I developed a fever, along with an all-over achy feeling as though I’d spent the night in the ring with the WWF. At first, I thought it was the summer flu. Having not used any sick days yet that year, I called in three days straight at the library. That’s when the spots began to appear.
I’d never been troubled with acne when I was younger. And, yes, I do know that that’s another one of those statements that could make some people hate me. But it’s true. All through junior high and high school, I could barely buy a zit to save my life. Except for the occasional one or two around my period, I was blemish free. How odd then to suddenly be seeing spots at nearly forty. Could my period be due again so quickly? I wondered, studying the spot on my cheek, the one on my forehead.
But then, as the hours went on, and one day turned into the next, I developed more spots on my face…and a few on my neck…and then on my chest.
I called my doctor’s office in a bit of a panic; don’t ask me why, but I was certain I had the measles.
The receptionist at Dr. Berg’s office was very accommodating when I told her I thought I had the measles, saying that he could see me that afternoon. Since it was usually necessary to call two to three months in advance to get a regular visit with the most popular doctor in the city, and even the average garden-variety emergency complaint still required at least a one-day wait to get seen, I recognized how seriously she was taking my spots. The appointment slot I was given was the first after the lunch break, presumably so I wouldn’t infect a bunch of other patients in the waiting room.
Okay, am I the only woman out there who’s a little in love with her doctor?
I’d been seeing Dr. Berg for about a dozen years, ever since my previous physician—whom I’ll call Dr. X—had nearly killed me, which had seemed like a good reason to stop seeing him. Dr. X had been treating me for an infection that wouldn’t go away, and when he started me on yet another round of medication, I began feeling weird. Repeated calls to his office to say just how weird I was feeling had merely yielded the usual “just another hypochondriac” tone from his nurse. Well, naturally, once my body broke out in tiny little red spots from head to toe—a nice indicator of anaphylactic shock—they told me to stop taking the medication. Immediately. That another dose might kill me. But when I tried to get them to admit their mistake, that they should have listened to me in the first place, they insisted that standard practice dictated they do exactly what they did and that they’d do it again tomorrow. That they’d never heard of anyone nearly dying from that particular drug, even though it had nearly killed me. I suspected they didn’t want to admit culpability because they were terrified of a malpractice suit. Well, I wasn’t interested in a malpractice suit, but I was interested in having a doctor who was a mensch, which clearly was not anyone in that office. And they’d nearly killed me.
Did I mention they’d nearly killed me?
Well, naturally, after that experience, I was leery of doctors.
And I was still leery of doctors when I’d first started seeing Dr. Berg, but he’d quickly won me over. He was just so nice, so reassuring, and he took so much time to just talk to his patients—and not just about their illnesses, answering all questions with extreme patience, but even about their lives or whatever was in the news. I always felt so much better just seeing him—that balding head, those steel-rimmed glasses—that I often found myself telling people, “Who cares if he knows anything about medicine? I still love him.” Too bad he was married and a grandfather already.
“So, I understand you’re not feeling so good today, Scarlett,” said Dr. Berg, glancing at what the nurse had written on my chart as he entered the examination room, hand outstretched for a warm shake; Dr. Berg never looked scared that he might catch something from a patient. Dr. X, on the other hand, had always given a can’t-you-people-keep-your-distance look at the audacity of patients coming to see him while sick. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“These spots.” I indicated my face. “I think I have the measles.”
“The measles?” He spoke in a soothing voice as he felt my lymph nodes, examined this, looked at that. “What makes you think so?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “All these red spots—it just seemed to me like this is what the measles would look like.”
“No,” he said, sitting down on the stool next to the examining table, pen already flying across his page, “you don’t have the measles. I’m pretty sure what you have is the chicken pox.”
“The chicken pox?”
“Yes,” he said, starting to write a prescription. “Have you been exposed to anyone recently that may have been infected?”
I told him about Sarah, the girl with the list in the library two weeks ago.
“Yup,” he said, doing the math on the dates, “that’s the incubation period.”
That damned precocious little reader, I thought. Why couldn’t she have waited until later in the season, just like the rest of the kids, to come in for her books? Or at least have waited until she really wasn’t contagious. I suppose that’s Harried Mom’s fault….
“Here,” he said, handing me the prescription he’d written. “Now, I want to warn you. This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.”
“You mean I’m going to feel even worse than I do now?”
“I’m afraid so. Chicken pox when you’re a kid is pretty easy. But as an adult? The older you get, the harder it is. You’re also going to be contagious for another seven to ten days, so no going out in public places until all the pocks scab over.”
Great.
“Now, I want you to call the office every day to let me know how you’re doing.” There was my reassuring Dr. Berg again. With all that talk of worse pain and the need to be quarantined, I’d wondered where he’d gone to. “This isn’t going to be easy for you and I’m going to want to keep a close eye on you until you start feeling better.”
“Thanks,” I said, glancing up and catching sight of myself in the mirror on the wall. Damn! I already had more spots than I had when I’d first come in there. “Um…can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Am I going to look like this forever? I feel like that animal in Put Me in the Zoo.”
“Put me in the zoo?” he asked, puzzled.
I sighed the sigh of the long-suffering librarian. It’s amazing how often people don’t get book references.
“Kids’ book,” I elaborated. “Animal keeps changing his spots. Big spots. Little spots. Red, blue, all the colors, really. Am I going to wind up like that?”
I felt strange, exposing myself that way. Over the years, we’d often talked about socio-cultural issues and he knew that I was big on saying that I didn’t think that appearances were as important as people made them out to be, that most women would be a lot happier if they stopped worrying about the outer so much and just focused on the inner. And I’d even backed it up by being the kind of woman who usually dressed casually, almost never bothered with makeup. Would he think now that all that had just been a sham? Would he think me shallow for being so concerned?
But he laughed, that reassuring sound. “Of course not. Provided you don’t scratch, before you know it, you’ll be just as beautiful as you’ve always been. Even with the spots, you still look good, Scarlett.”
It really was too bad about that wife and those grandchildren.
“Can I ask you a question now?” he said.
“Sure.”
“Why didn’t you get the chicken pox as a kid, just like everybody else?”
4
(And now for a little station break, as we