The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [92]
THERE’S ANOTHER STORY I want to tell you, and then I’ll be finished. I don’t think people should talk about their health, but this story is more about love than medicine. I had gone to the dentist for a routine cleaning. The dental hygienist, a pleasant woman about my age with whom I conversed easily, had just about finished the job when, as she was examining my throat, she said, “Hmm.” She asked me to open wider and to say, “Ah.” I did. She looked. I gazed out the window at the view. She did not say what she was looking at. I stayed calm. She called in the dentist, who also took a long look at me — at my tonsils, it turned out, and the uvula, on which were spots of some sort.
“There’s something there,” she said with maddening nonspecificity. “I don’t think it’s serious, but I’m sending you to a specialist. Just for a look.”
“What do you see?” I asked.
“Probably nothing,” she said. “Probably just a couple of papillomas. Which are like warts, a wart on your throat.” She looked at me carefully. “Really,” she said, “that’s all I think they are.”
She gave me the name of the specialist I was to see, a Dr. Hovhanessian. When I called his office, I discovered that I would have to wait for a month for an appointment. It was August, and Dr. Hov would be on vacation, his secretary told me, so I — and my throat and its contents — would have to bide the time until he returned.
On the day of the appointment, I drove over to the medical complex, checked in at his front desk, and sat in the waiting room reading old copies of Time and Newsweek. Eventually the nurse called my name and ushered me into an examination room that at its center featured a chair like a dentist’s chair. Up on the wall were various posters about deafness and throat cancer. I had thought about throat cancer and about the possible choking or pain that might accompany it, I thought of speaking with an artificial larynx, but the truth is that until that moment I had really done my best to be a man about it and to keep the whole matter out of my mind. I’m quite good at such denials and exclusions.
Bad health is for others. I’m not supposed to get sick.
But in that examination room with that black chair in front of me, my heart began to pound, and because the chair I was sitting in was a simple metal one with stainless steel sleighlike runners resting on the slippery blue-speckled linoleum tile, I found myself moving slowly across the floor, powered by the pounding of my heart against my back. Fear has a certain horsepower, I discovered.
Dr. Hovhanessian eventually arrived. He was an oval-faced man who affected an authoritative air and who presented a general and perhaps inflated aura of competence. We exchanged pleasantries and he was kind enough to show interest in the research work I do for the drug company (I’m a molecular biologist). Then he said, “Let’s have a look at you.”
When the exam was over, he leaned back and said, “You don’t have anything.”
“I don’t have anything?”
“You had your tonsils out once. Those are lymphatic deposits. They’ve been there for years.”
“Oh.” Then I smiled. “I guess that’s a relief.”
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said. Then he rubbed his face. “You know, when I first started to practice medicine, I thought my patients wanted me to give them a clear diagnosis of their illnesses and a clear course of treatment. But that’s wrong. What my patients really want is for me to tell them that nothing is wrong with them and that they’ll be fine and that