It Looked Different on the Model - Laurie Notaro [33]
“Okay …” the receptionist said.
“I’m a gagger?” I added. “Like, relentless gagging when the mold tray was in my mouth?”
“Oh,” the receptionist said. “Laurie Notaro. How can I help you?”
“Will the teeth whitener turn my tongue snail colors? Like from lime to olive to brown?” I asked.
“Sure,” I was told. “If it can change the color of your teeth, it can change the color of your tongue, especially if you’re using the tray overnight.”
Now, I don’t blame the doctor for not knowing that my Hairy Tongue wasn’t hairy after all but that I was turning it the colors of death because of the chemicals I was putting on my teeth. But he did scare the shit out of me, and when I asked Nana what a Hairy Tongue was, all she said was, “That sounds disgusting and I have no idea what that is. Don’t use my bathroom the next time you come here.”
So when I broke my toe smacking it against the cast-iron back bar of my elliptical machine, I rolled around in pain with a purple little piggy that got swollen so bad I could only wear slippers.
And I stayed home and practiced prairie medicine, which would be to frame the situation as “You live alone on the prairie with your ma, pa, and two sisters, and you have broken your toe. What do you do?” And the answer is almost always “Will a bran muffin make that better? Then leave it alone.”
Now, I can’t say that I was thinking that as I was walking back from the bathroom to the bedroom in the middle of the night and catastrophe struck. I was almost back in bed and was standing alongside it when I stepped on Barnaby, my geriatric cat, who by this time was too old to jump up onto the bed and slept on the floor in a pile of my clothes that I was too lazy to hang up. It is well documented that the cat and I had an adversarial relationship, particularly concerning chocolate stars, but not really to the point that I wanted to snap his spine in half like a twig. I knew for a fact that I stepped on him and was terrified I had horribly hurt him, but I had my earplugs in and couldn’t hear if he had screeched or not.
Without pause, I reached down to see if he was okay, but just like that, I felt a terrific blow to my face, and my head jerked back. I fell forward onto the bed, both hands covering my nose as I entered the most primitive state I have ever known (including Ambien) and began emitting deep guttural noises that I couldn’t control, let alone stop. Suddenly a hand was on my back, pulling me up, and I opened my eyes to see my husband’s terrified expression, which was anything but reassuring. Quickly, I realized that I had not been at the side of the bed but at the foot of it, and in the dark and half asleep, I had smacked the underside of my nose directly on the edge of the footboard.
Blood had already begun to seep through my fingers when my husband pulled my hands away from my face and gave me a towel.
“We need to go to the hospital,” he tried to say calmly. “I think you should put your pants on.”
I shook my head.
“Yes, we need to go,” he insisted. “We need to have a doctor look at your nose. I think it’s broken.”
“No it’s not,” I gasped. “It’s fine.”
The last thing I needed was someone touching my frigging nose. No way anyone was getting near it. Even to have someone look at it would hurt. It was like I’d been hit with a two-by-four in the facenuts, if such a hideous, horrible thing existed. I just wanted to lie down and have the pain dribble out of me.
“It sounded like the crack of a baseball bat,” he said.
“It’s not broken,” I mumbled again.
“It sounded like a hatchet chopping into a tree,” he continued, making me more and more unlikely to agree to put pants on.
“You can’t make me put pants on,” I said firmly. “And if you’re foolish enough to try, you should know that my toenails are extra long right now.”
He backed off like an attentive husband should and left me