When You Are Bugged To Go To The Doctor
BIZARRE, CALIFORNIA, DOCTOR/PHYSICIAN, MEDICAL OFFICE, NON-DIALOGUE, PETS & ANIMALS, USA | HEALTHY | NOVEMBER 27, 2019
When I’m in high school, I come down with a bad fever and my mother takes me to the doctor. I’m still seeing a pediatrician at this point. The building the office is in is undergoing construction.
Pretty soon I’m in the examination room, my mom sitting to the side. The doctor is a young woman, wearing a gauzy green sweater and some light gold jewelry. I notice a very shiny, pretty brooch shaped like a scarab pinned to her sweater.
She leans in with the tongue depressor, and as I watch in horror, the “brooch” sticks out a barbed leg and starts crawling up her shoulder! I scream and throw myself back.
“Are you okay?” asks the doctor. She thinks I’m scared of the tongue depressor.
“There’s a huge bug on you!” I yell.
This sets the doctor off. She shrieks, drops the tongue depressor, and starts frantically trying to brush the bug off her sweater. In the process, she breaks her necklace, sending bits of golden chain flying across the room. Part of it hits me and I think it’s the bug, so I scream again and the cycle begins anew.
Eventually, the doctor calms down a little, but we’re still trying to find the bug. She turns around and I spot it on her shoulder and yell, “It’s still there!” This time she holds still and my mom gets it off her with a tissue and squishes it in the garbage can.
Once everyone’s calmed down, Mom comments that she should have saved it, or at least not crushed it, since it was actually very pretty. She thought I was having a hallucination until she saw it herself! We figure it got in from all the construction downstairs. The rest of the appointment goes fine, though the doctor and I are a bit shaken up; my mom is pretty level-headed.
When we check out, the nurse at the desk asks what happened. We tell her and she laughs and says, “We get a lot of screaming in this office, but usually it’s not from the doctors!”
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