Tap dancing through the American medi-go-round

“Medications?” the nurse asked.

“None,” I said.

She stared at me. “Blood pressure meds? Cholesterol?” She was just trying to be helpful, because geezers my age can forget.

“Nope.”

She gazed at the computer screen in front of her. “I don’t know what box to check,” she said.

“Really? They don’t leave a little room for ‘Doing just fine’ on that form?”

“I guess not,” she said.

But then, why would they? After all, this was a doctor’s office, not a hobby shop. If there’s nothing wrong with you, what the hell are you doing here?

“Well, does Irish whiskey count as a medication?” I asked.

“Afraid not.”

“If I promise to take a baby aspirin when I get home, would that help?”

“There we go,” she said, and she clicked a box on the computer. I was glad to help, even though I would probably forget to take the aspirin. I’m a geezer; my memory isn’t what it used to be. Or maybe it is. I don’t remember.

I was there at the immediate-care center because my heart had done a little flip-flopping at breakfast that morning, as if the hamster running around the wheel in there had stubbed his toe and was now stumbling a bit. By itself it wasn’t too bad, but I figured if the hamster decided to hop off the wheel and rub his foot for a while, that could be trouble.

“Have you been under exceptional stress lately?” she asked, filling in more boxes to figure out why my heart-rodent was suddenly a stumblebum.

“Yeah, I guess you could say so,” I said, having lost my wife only a few months earlier after 48 years of marriage.

“What did you have for breakfast today?”

“Coffee.”

“How much?”

“Oh, six or seven cups.”

She looked at me with one eyebrow raised, lips pursed, her head nodding in a slow scold. “I think we might be narrowing in on why you’re here today,” she said.

Before she left to fetch the doctor, she made me promise to cut back on the coffee and whiskey and eat breakfast from now on. And lunch, because I often skipped that, too. I promised her I would, because I had made her day hard enough searching for nonexistent boxes that would apply to someone like me.

The doctor had her wire me up for an EKG, which showed that my hamster was still jogging, though he liked to skip every now and then. Or maybe he was hopping on one leg. Or tap-dancing.

The doctor thought an echocardiogram might help find out what was going on in there, so he had his secretary set up an appointment for me with a cardiologist.

But the earliest opening was six weeks in the future!

“Wow,” I said, “good thing it’s only my heart, right?”

I survived the triple fortnight, and when I went to see the cardiologist, he agreed with the other doctor: I should get an echocardiogram.

“Yeah, that’s why I’m here,” I said.

“Oh, we don’t do that here. We’ll set up an appointment for you.”

“So why am I here, then?” I barked. “When am I actually going to see a doctor who can do something other than send me to another doctor?”

To prove that he could do stuff, he had the nurse tape a Holter monitor to my chest, which I had to wear for five days and mail back for analysis. Serves me right for questioning the efficiency of the American medi-go-round.

Two weeks later I lay on a gurney half-naked as a nurse smeared goo on my chest and took echocardio-snapshots of my skipping, stumbling, tap-dancing hamster. I was a little embarrassed to strip my shirt off, because now I was five pounds heavier from all those breakfasts and lunches. And a bit cranky from caffeine deficiency. How do people survive on only three cups of coffee in the morning, dammit?

“Well, how does it look?” I asked.

“Looks like a heart,” she said — good news, I guess. She didn’t specify if it looked like a human heart, or if my hamster’s little wheel had blown an O-ring.

“Anything wrong in there?” I asked,

“Oh, the doctor will have to read the results. He’s not here now. He’ll call you.”

“More hurry up and wait?” I said. I was getting desperate to know if there would ever be any light at the end of this medi-maze.

“Well,” she said, in a futile attempt to fend off more caffeine-withdrawal whining from me, “the good news is that we’re letting you go home today, so you’ve got that going for you.”

“Really? Being shanghaied was an option?”

“Happens more often than you’d want to know,” she said, with a look that added: “You can stop griping and go home now…or we can do this another way.” She said the doctor would call as soon as all the results were tallied from the EKG, the echocardiogram, and the five-day chest-monitor mamba.

And so I went home and waited to hear from the doctor.

A week later I got a letter with a one-sentence test result: “The echocardiogram of your heart does not demonstrate abnormalities at this time.” (In other words: There is nothing wrong with you — except for what’s wrong with you.) Beneath that result was one other helpful sentence from the doctor: “I recommend that you continue your current medications.”

I felt my hamster laugh when I read that line. Or maybe it was a hiccup from my Irish “medications.”

So I guess that’s it. Two months after dashing to my friendly neighborhood immediate-care center, the verdict is in: My wobbly heart might still keep me alive — at least until I see the bill.

I reckon I’ll just have to get used to being an old geezer with a hobbled hamster tap-dancing in his chest.

I think I’ll name him Mr. Bojangles.

Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.

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