LOM Chapter 3: Eggs
Mom had no idea why I was walking through the house semi-naked, so that evening she, dad, and I had ourselves an awkward family talk. Ever since I had grown taller—by two inches—than my mother, she deferred all potential confrontations to my father, who still had four inches on me. My height mirrors my inherited traits almost perfectly: I am about two-thirds like my mother, whom I resemble in hair, eyes, and build, and perhaps one-third like my father, most obviously in the chin and temperament.
The problem for mom was that dad was much more laid-back, with little mettle for punishment and discipline. Dad de-deferred to mom on the grounds that he had not witnessed the incident that occasioned our meeting, so Mom hinted and hedged but eventually made clear that she thought I had committed some sort of perversity on our pool deck while she was away. This forced me to admit my real problem, to assure my parents that the afternoon’s embarrassment had merely been a lapse of judgment and not a failure of moral character. I assured them that I had the problem under control, but they insisted that I make an appointment with the family physician.
Dr. Kudafer had a cancellation two days later. I asked Joey’s permission to leave work early, and when he let me go I drove home so that mom could take me to my appointment. She and I waited for a few minutes until my name was called, and then we followed a nurse past the reception desk into the examination area. The nurse was a plump and gentle woman named Bonnie, who was wearing what looked like pajamas with small, bright teddy bears printed on a blue cloth. Before showing us to an exam room, she put me on a scale.
“A hundred thirty-seven,” she said, writing it down in my file. “That’s down a little from last year.”
“I was up over one forty since then,” I said. “One thirty seven means I’ve lost some weight.”
“I wish I weighed one thirty seven,” said Bonnie.
“You’re not five eight,” I replied.
“Wesley,” mom sighed.
“Sorry,” I said.
Bonnie took us to an examination room and had me sit in a chair next to the wall. She fastened a blood pressure cuff around my arm and pumped the cuff full of air until my arm ached and my fingers swelled purple, then felt for my pulse and watched a stopwatch as the cuff deflated in a whisper. “Good,” she said, with no more information than that. Then she used a probe to take my temperature from my ear. When that showed normal, she made a note on her clipboard and then left the room.
Soon after Dr. Kudafer knocked on the door and entered the room. He was tall and wiry—the halls of his office were decorated with with framed pictures of him crossing the finish lines of a half-dozen different marathons going back several years. Except for his glasses, the man was a portrait of perfect health: not particularly handsome, but obviously alive and vigorous. He was the only vegetarian I knew until high school, he never smoked and only drank wine in moderation, took a multivitamin every day, drank green tea instead of coffee, and enjoyed the sort of respect from his patients that especially pompous clerics demand from their parishioners. When Dr. Kudafer gave medical advice, it was obviously coming from a man who practiced what he preached to the very letter. And should you go astray, the shame burned in you all through the waiting room and up until the moment you blurted out your confession: “Forgive me, Dr. Kudafer—it’s just… I really don’t like cruciferous green vegetables.”
He had me sit on the table in the middle of the room and took over the stool that my mother had been sitting on. My mother stood.
Dr. Kudafer asked for my symptoms, and I told him that I had been going to the bathroom a lot.
“Diarrhea?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I did not mention that I had crapped my pants.
“Take off your shirt and lie back,” he said. I took off my shirt and lay back on the exam table; the thin paper sheet was rough and cool against my skin. I lifted my legs as Kudaver extended the leg rests on the table.
“Any abdominal pain? Cramping? Fever?” He pushed gently on my abdomen, working his way from across, just beneath my rib cage.
“Not really. I mean, my guts get cramped up when I have to go.”
“But going relieves the cramps?” Now he was pressing on my lower abdomen. It was uncomfortable, but not painful. It made me feel just a little like I had to go – that same kind of pressure. He had to push down the waistband of my boxers to get to that part of my belly. My mother turned away, and I also tried not to look. Dr. Kudafer was awfully close to bad touching, and only my faith in his healing abilities kept me from protesting.
“Mostly,” I said.
“Well, could be any number of things,” he said. “I don’t feel any masses or swelling. We’ll do some blood work, take a sample, and maybe order some other tests. You can sit up and put your shirt back on.”
“A sample?” said my mom.
“Yes,” said Dr. Kudafer. “A stool sample.”
“You mean poo?” I asked.
“Your feces,” Kudafer said, speaking to me. “You’ll do it at home, say first thing in the morning, and bring it in. We should know in a day or two whether there any ova or parasites.”
“Ova?” said my mom.
“Eggs,” said Dr. Kudafer.
I knew what ova were, but I guessed he was not planning to make an omelet from my sample. “Eggs from what?”
“Intestinal parasites. Roundworms, tapeworms, that sort of thing. It’s unlikely, but we have to check. Are you still swimming?” Dr. Kudafer had given me my annual physical for water polo for the past three years.
“I work at the Gravlin pool, but I don’t actually spend that much time in it.”
“Well, stay away from it. Public pools can be bad for spreading this kind of thing. We call it ‘recreational waterborne illness’, but it’s basically swimming pool diarrhea. Every year there are a few mini-epidemics focused on public pools -lots of kids get sick because one kid leaked a little feces into the water.”
“I clean the pool, actually. I’ll keep the chlorine on the high end.”
“That might not be enough. Some of these organisms are pretty hardy. Keep an eye out for anybody who seems to be spending a lot time in the bathrooms; they might also have it. We won’t know for sure what it is until we see that sample. I’ll have the nurse bring in the container and the form for your blood work.”
“Are you going to give him anything for the diarrhea?” my mother asked.
“Not yet. You can take loperamide or any other over-the-counter medicine for it, but I don’t want to prescribe anything else until I know what’s wrong. If your sample comes back positive for bacteria, I’ll just call a prescription in to your pharmacy – you won’t have to schedule another appointment. All right?”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Bonnie will be in a minute to get you out of here.” I lay back on the paper sheet and it crinkled and shifted beneath me. Bonnie knocked on the door seconds later, and entered with a small, clear plastic cup in her hand. She gave me the cup and a set of forms to take to the part of the building where I had to get my blood drawn.
“Fill this up so it’s at least past the line,” she said, pointing to the cup. “It doesn’t have to be completely full, but don’t get any urine or toilet water in it – that will spoil the sample. Any questions?”
I could think of none.
Dr. Kudafer’s office was one of many in a building more or less given over to the outpatient practices of doctors associated with the hospital. One of the ancillary offices was a blood lab, where my mom and I went after the appointment. We turned in the paperwork and waited for my name to be called. When it was my turn, a technician in a white lab coat took me back into a room full of high-backed, vinyl-upholstered easy chairs. I sat in one and the technician lowered a small desk onto the armrests.
“Which arm you want?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” I replied.
“Which hand you write with?”
“Right,” I said.
“‘We’ll go left, then.”
I extended my left hand, and he rolled up the sleeve of my t-shirt. He wrapped a wide rubber strip around my arm and tied it off in a torniquet, then gave me a foam ball to squeeze in that hand. As I did, I saw the veins fill and rise in my flesh.
“You got good veins,” he said. “Real strong and pretty.” He tore the seal from a plastic container that held a needle and some tubing. “Okay, a little stick here.” He jabbed the needle into my arm.
“Ouch,” I sighed.
“It’s okay – that’s it,” he replied. “I’ll just get a little blood and we’ll be done.” He wiggled the needle a little, which made it hurt more, and then tapped my arm above the site.
“Shoot – okay,” he said. “I must’a hit a valve. I’m gonna try to get past it.” He pulled the needle out a little and pushed it back in, which also hurt, but the thin clear tubing attached to the needle filled with blood. “Good – that’s it.”
The technician picked up a test tube with a purple rubber stopper in the top. I thought he would have to unseal it first, but he pressed the stoppered end into the receptacle attached to the needle, and blood started flowing into the tube. When it was mostly full he removed it and looked at it while tilting it back and forth. He then affixed an adhesive label to the tube and placed it into a bag marked “Biohazard”. The red-stoppered test tube was replaced by one with a purple stopper, and as that tube was filling he loosened the tourniquet. When the purple test tube was full, he removed it. He folded a piece of gauze into a wad, then held it close to the needle, which he then yanked out of my arm. He asked me to hold the gauze over the puncture wound while he labeled the purple tube and put it into the bag with the other. Finally, he put a small piece of tape over the gauze and sent me back into the waiting room to join my waiting mother.
League of Mortals by Duncan Cross is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Chapter 2. Surprise!
Chapter 3. Eggs
Chapter 4. A “sample”
Chapter 5. Buttwad
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.