In My Professional Opinion

"Amy," my mother is whispering. "Amy!"

I'm slapping my bare feet against the linoleum floor, which is covered with off-white plaster dust. It doesn't hurt, and the empty, echo-y noise it's making sounds good to me in the office, which is filled with the soft droning of the secretary, the louder singing of the doctor and a substantial grinding sound. It's a crazy noise, and I like to fit in.

"Amy, look."

I slam down my feet one more time for effect and finally look up at my mother, expecting her to tell me to quit it, but she just nods her head towards the wall of the room and smiles incredulously at me. I turn my gaze to the series of pine frames on the wall and feel my forehead wrinkle with confusion.

"Jesus, what is wrong with these people?" in an equally urgent whisper. After more careful consideration of the photographs, which at first looked like standard doctor's office fare, their oddity is evident. The innocent lamb's limbs are twisted and its hooves are excessively and evilly pointed. Lying in the fetal position on what looks like Santa's oversized throne (only made of driftwood), the lamb is the perfect sacrifice for a vengeful orthopedic god. Which is actually fine, because we're at the orthotist's office.

"Where I'm from, we have an expression," the orthotist has re-entered the room, brandishing my old pair of orthotics and oblivious to the streak of white plaster caked onto his cheek. "Never," he lilts in a South African accent. "Never send a boy to do a man's job."

My mother and I look at each other, sharing an identical eyebrow raise and and a single thought: what the hell is he talking about?

"So, you're saying...?"

"These are shit, but I'll do what I can to make 'em better."

He leaves the room again and a second later his distracted singing and the grinding start up again as he resumes work.

"And that one is... what? A caribou?" I point to another photograph of an inelegant, antlered animal seemingly mid-pirouette.

"A moose maybe," my mother counters. "En pointe."

Half an hour later we're walking back to the car, my feet feeling better in shoes than they've felt in a year. It's sunny, and as I swing into the car, my mother cranks up the air conditioning.

"Did that seem a little... well..." She starts backing up and maneuvers toward the highway, leaving her sentence unfinished like a mad lib. ______ Predicate adjective.

"Normal?"

I seem to go to an awful lot of doctor's appointments. Usually it's nothing too terrible, and it's more the quantity of these visits that is staggering. What's also staggering is the consistent quirkiness of the doctors' (and nurses' and other non-M.D. specialists') personalities.

"Um, thank you," I'm telling the apprentice at the other orthotist's office (the one who made the 'shit' pair) as she repeatedly asks Jesus to bless my mother and me. Fingering the large wooden cross around her neck and gazing rapturously at my feet, everyone in that office seems scarily focused. Having listened to three hours about the inherent miracle and beauty of the foot, the effect is not unlike saying a single word over and over again until the syllables seem abstract and non-descriptive. Foot, foot, foot, foot, foot.

"Your feet are very curvy," my physical therapist is rubbing my right foot and making intense eye contact with me. He's filling in for my regular therapist and making me nervous. His resemblance to a guy I used to date is staggering, and looking at him is like looking at V projected 20 years into the future. Copious chest hair blossoming into view, aided by a casually unbuttoned Polo; a gold chain nestles itchily. Striking Italian features and suggestive pink lips smile at me.

"Huh?"

"Deeply arched."

It's not just my feet.

I had the flu all of last week, and in between blowing my nose, went to the doctor a couple of times. My feet are swinging above the floor as I perch on the exam table. My head feels disconnected from the rest of my body, contentedly hovering as I look around the small room. An oversized photograph of two little brunette girls. A bridal portrait, obviously from the 1980's. A three-feet tall photograph of midgets. What? The midgets are wearing carnival-like attire, the man in a royal blue tuxedo with matching top hat and the woman in a sparkly dress previously reserved for ice skaters. A smiling toddler, grazing their chins, stands smugly in the frame. I glare at him, hating him for having the life-size barbies I always wanted but never got.

A petite, intensely cheerful doctor walks into the room. In a high voice, he asks me about my symptoms and then promptly offers to prescribe hydrocodone - a narcotic pain reliever - for my cough. I've never heard of using narcotics as cough suppressants, and remembering the hallucinations and drooling that ensued the last time I took this medication (after my foot surgery), I decline, and he writes me a prescription for something non-addictive.

Later, when I'm filling the prescription at CVS, I tell the pharmacist about how the anti-viral I'd previously been prescribed to shorten the duration of the flu made me throw up.

"Oh yah," he reflects in a slight Midwestern accent. "That'll happen sometimes. Actually, every medication has the possible side effects of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. That helped me a lot at pharm school. On exams, the question would be 'list three side effects of this medication,' and I'd always just write nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Heh."

Is everyone in the medical community born like this? Outrageously, shamelessly eccentric? More likely it's something that develops; the personality that emerges after years of having people defer to your professional opinion.

I'm out at a South Beach club with K, who's just starting medical school. I'm sucking on a vodka cranberry, passively interacting with a group of her friends, who are all also future doctors.

"And so they tell us not to name the corpses," an attractive, dark-haired student is telling what he obviously thinks is his party story, "but I mean come on! We dissect the fucking things for an entire semester. 'Bob' is like my buddy. He's the man!" (Whatever, maybe he was the man.)

So this is how it starts!

The dermatologist who looked at my henna tattoo and smilingly told me that tattoos, to him, meant promiscuity. The orthopedist who slapped my thigh and said 'that sucks!' about my chronic pain. The gynecologist who jokingly squirted KY jelly onto my big toe. The emergency room nurse who didn't bother to tell me that my suspected asthma attack was just a panic attack, and if I calmed down, I'd be fine. Mr. OneNightStand, who asked me, during post-coital pillow talk, if I was ovulating.

And this is where it stops!

"God! Enough! Normal people do not want to hear about the damn corpses over cocktails." The storyteller eyes me with annoyance; I'm ruining all the fun. He shrugs and the conversation shifts.

I saw that look he gave me though. The look that, with a few years of practice, may disdainfully undercut my self-worth, punishing me for not having an M.D., and send me running into the arms of my shrink. Another doctor.