Annabel - Kathleen Winter [114]
He had a lot of explaining to do when he tried to tell the receptionist and the nurses why he had come in. He had to make not one but seven trips to the hospital before they understood his case, or thought they understood it. He brought in the forms his father had forwarded to him, outlining the medications he was supposed to take and their cost, and he gave the names of the doctors who had treated him in Goose Bay, or at least those whose names he remembered. Several times during this process he lost his courage and thought, These people are never going to be able to help me. He watched other patients in the corridors, and that made him want to run away. There was a man whose mouth sat perpetually open lying in a cot next to a bucket of grey water that had a mop standing in it. From a cafeteria somewhere in the bowels of the building came the smell of alphabet soup and meat pies. When doctors finally did listen to Wayne, sitting in an admission room holding clipboards, he realized they were not doctors but people who interviewed you before a doctor did. They interviewed him at length, then left him to wait a long time alone in the room.
He went through with all this because he feared the swelling and the tenderness in his belly. When, after several visits, his records finally arrived from Goose Bay, a doctor named Haldor Carr came in with two more doctors and seven interns. These observers all watched carefully, hoping to learn a great deal from Haldor Carr about a kind of case most interns never got to see.
His first real appointment involved the doctors telling Wayne he should not have done what he had done. They were unhappy that he had stopped taking the green pills, the white capsules, and the tiny yellow pills. He should at least, they said, have consulted with them first and agreed upon a timetable. He should not have taken matters into his own hands. Now they could guarantee nothing. They could not guarantee the safety of any medical intervention from now on, and had Wayne considered this before he had acted so rashly, they would not now all be in a position of risk. It was not just the patient’s own health that was at risk here, Haldor Carr said.
Wayne realized the doctor had stopped talking to him and was addressing his interns. Haldor Carr was a teaching physician, and he was teaching now. Wayne was an exhibit. He wanted to leave the room, but if he did that there would be no way to find out if his body had again become pregnant. He was terrified it had, so he stayed in the room with this crowd of people, none of whom looked at him directly except for one girl, an Asian intern, small and serious.
Wayne did not know what Dr. Haldor Carr was ready to do in the name of teaching and of medicine. He might remove Wayne’s penis, or his womb. Wayne heard him talk about these possibilities. Or Haldor Carr might do nothing but reopen Wayne’s vagina and ask each intern to insert a gloved hand and feel the cervix, the placement of it and its distance from the vaginal opening.
Wayne listened to all of this and felt helpless and angry. He realized the doctor did not know any right or wrong thing to do, and that his motives for deciding were not the same as his own. Haldor Carr had power and Wayne felt powerless. He was lying down, but he forced himself to sit up and use the only thing of influence that he owned: his voice. His voice did not want to come out of